


GROCERY LIST: Gatalentan tea, my mother, a real girlfriend

by flexible_flyer



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars: Aftermath - Chuck Wendig, Star Wars: Poe Dameron (Comics)
Genre: Coffee, F/F, F/M, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Family, Friendship, Lesbians in Space, Trans Character, being old and responsible, flashlight tag, paperwork in space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-13
Updated: 2017-11-13
Packaged: 2019-02-01 16:29:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 31,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12708678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flexible_flyer/pseuds/flexible_flyer
Summary: Snap has such great plans. Like lying to her mother. And then covering her lies with more lies. Such great plans!





	GROCERY LIST: Gatalentan tea, my mother, a real girlfriend

**Author's Note:**

> I can't explain how I would up writing this without sounding ridiculously petty, but for the record, this was not something I planned to do with my life for thirty thousand words. But like. Things happen sometimes. I would like to thank Stellarer, for encouraging me to write the fic I wanted to see in the world, and for betareading with love. All remaining weirdness is all my fault.
> 
> I'm @loveisworry on tumblr & twitter if you wanna hang out.

Okay, where to start. Here, with a confession: Snap is only half paying attention to the briefing. Poe’s talking about their next mission, which is just escorting transports to the new base. Snap was the person to scout, and she plotted the route the evacuation is using. Nothing he’s saying is new. It’s an incredibly easy mission. Mostly she’s staring at the weird thing Poe’s hair is doing, where there’s like, one curl going in a completely different direction than everything else. It looks ridiculous. She’s really enjoying it.

Poe’s talking like, blah blah blah, hyperspace lanes, generally charming in a way Snap has gotten used to. He looks tired. And then something breaks through Snap’s distraction — “We’re going to meet up with General Antilles and the bit of the Republic fleet that's decided he's in charge and we aren't criminals."

There’s more to it too, something about how they haven’t decided how to integrate the Republic pilots yet, but everyone’s staying in the same squadron for now, which Snap doesn’t need to think about now. It’s boring, and she has the seniority to pretty much pick her place in the Resistance. She’s been a part of the Resistance since the beginning. She’s been doing this whole thing for a long time. She flew an X-wing in battle for the first time when she was sixteen, because Wedge let her, even though he maybe shouldn’t’ve. It worked out fine though. 

They both lived. And now Wedge is going to be here — or no, not here. But in a week they’re both going to be on the same planet, and a few of Snap’s little white lies will catch up with her at last.

So, the thing is — her mother wants her to be happy. Which makes sense, that’s what mothers do. And Snap is pretty happy, most days. She loves her friends, she gets to fly. It’s all pretty good, except for the war. It’s great, except that they’re fighting super evil fascists, and don’t really have resources or funding, and it’s all on the brink of everything collapsing if the General stops yelling at the right people, which is definitely concerning. The galaxy is all kinds of fucked up, but personally, Snap’s pretty happy with the little life here.

Her mother only sort of gets it, which also, is what mothers do. Norra tries, and she loves her daughter, but only kind of gets it, which is fine. Norra is almost seventy, and lives on Chandrila now, where she took up gardening and coming up with excuses why her daughter never visits that aren’t being involved in a super illegal kinda secret resistance movement. 

Snap tries to call her every month, but sometimes she’s busy, and sometimes she can’t find a secure connection, and sometimes the idea of talking to her mother, who she loves, is very exhausting, and she’s already so tired, for very valid reasons. Her mother always has all of these questions: have you been eating well, are you getting enough sleep, how’s your X-wing handling — all these ways of asking “are you safe?” without going out and asking it.

Obviously, this means Snap lies a lot. She was eating great the week they lost a supply shipment and they were down to ration bars and canned soup from K’jek. She was sleeping fine the week where no one could figure out what was setting off the proximity alarms in the middle of the night. (It was a nocturnal plant. A giant plant that bloomed in the middle of the night, making the ground shake enough to set off alarms and wake the whole base up.) Her X-wing actually is always handling well, or well enough, and sometimes she’ll ask her mother for opinions about repairs, because that’s the kind of thing they enjoy talking about. But she never says anything about how hard it is to get ahold of spare parts, how she’s started fabricating replacement pieces for the whole squadron, which is working out fine, and feels pretty good about, but isn’t entirely sure will hold up under stress, because she didn’t train as a machinist, she’s just trying her best.

Yes, she’s happy. Yes, she’s safe. Safe enough, don’t worry, it’s going to be fine. She’s doing what has to be done. She’s where she needs to be. Norra should understand.

Norra left to join the Rebellion when Snap was just a kid. After Imperials took her dad, Norra left Snap to live with her aunties while she went looking. And when she didn’t find him, she joined up to fly a Y-wing instead. She would call home when she could, and tell lies about sleeping well, and eating well, and being as safe as could be. When Norra left, Snap was still young enough to believe her, but that didn’t last long.

Snap has mostly moved past feeling abandoned by her mother. She understands. She thinks she would have done the same thing. It’s just that sometimes, when she’s lying to her mother about her safety, she wonders why they’re still playing this game. It’s not like Norra doesn’t understand how dangerous it really is.

Still, she’s going to keep lying. She’s a good daughter. Her mother’s old, her mother worries. Snap’s going to do her best to make it seem less scary, and that means lying. Most of the lies aren’t even important. They’re unverifiable. 

Except for this one question: “Are you seeing anyone?”

Because, see, Norra wants her daughter to be happy, and not lonely. And yes, Snap may have left a fairly long term relationship when the Resistance went outlaw, but they were falling apart for a long time before she left, even if Snap never told her mother about that, because Norra thought Vima was lovely, and Snap sort of liked being treated like an adult with a partner and a future and stuff. It was all a lot of banthashit, but still. She liked pretending. She might have kept pretending if it wasn’t for the re-emergence of fascism as a major force in the galaxy. 

But instead she’s here, resisting the Order, as single as an old Republic Jedi, with no prospects.

For a while, she didn’t lie when her mother asked if she was seeing anyone. Not about the actual facts of the situation. She’d say it was too soon since the breakup, or she was too busy, or she was trying to focus on herself right now. All various degrees of truth in those excuses. She wasn’t seeing anyone, and said as much.

The trouble started when she got tired of saying the same true answer and seeing the disappointment in her mother’s eyes. That day came three months ago, when Snap cracked, and said, yes, she was in a new relationship, it was very exciting, and very new, and she didn’t want to say anything else and jinx it. 

Things have been super busy, so she’s only talked to her mother once since then, for about five minutes the day after Starkiller, where they basically cried at each other and didn’t talk about all of the people they knew in the Hosnian system who were dead now. Snap actually felt a lot better afterwards. Point being, there was no mention of Snap’s fictional paramour.

But now Wedge is going to be here, and Wedge will have heard from her mother that she’s dating someone, and Wedge will ask questions, in the weird pseudo-paternal-but-not-stepping-on-any-toes-way they’ve found works for them. Wedge is sort of like a cool older brother figure, except that he’s been dating her mom off and on for like thirty years. Snap has spent almost thirty years purposefully not thinking about how Wedge is closer in age to her than to her mom, and she’s gotten really good at it. Really really good.

Wedge is definitely going to want to meet whoever she’s dating, so he’ll be able to gossip with her mother. He won’t be judgy or protective or any of the things fathers sometimes are in old holodramas, because he isn’t her father or anything. But he’s observant, and he’ll ask questions, and he’ll be so happy for her. He just wants her to be happy too. Happy and safe, with someone to care about.

The last Snap heard, from the old people gossip network, Wedge is living with her mother when he isn’t on mission. That isn’t surprising really, but is different than what they had been doing before, which was pretending they were just old friends who spent a lot of time together. Making another go at living together again isn’t _surprising,_ but it would have been nice to get told this by her mother, instead of by Hobbie the last time he brought by a bacta delivery.

Every time Norra asked Snap if she was seeing anyone, she should have turned the question around, see how her mother liked being interrogated about her love life. The problem being that Snap didn’t actually care that much. Still, she would have listened to the old people romance gossip if it meant not getting herself stuck in this kriffing mess of a lie.

Maybe she could keep lying? Whoever she’s dating could be off on a mission! A spy mission that she can’t talk about! Iolo’s been off on a spy mission for almost four months, and they’re only mostly sure he isn’t dead. She could say she’s dating someone on an important spy mission, Wedge would understand.

Her mother would be so disappointed though.

She should just lie. Make up a fake girlfriend on an important mission, or a fake boyfriend who’s deep undercover, a totally awesome partner who’s not around for a totally reasonable reason. Wedge would probably be able to tell that something’s off, but there’s a decent chance he wouldn’t ask, they try to respect each other’s right to be mysterious. But he’d definitely know something was up. He’s unfortunately strangely perceptive, probably from all the times he was out of contact and totally doing cool spy stuff. Or maybe it’s just that he’s known her since she was sixteen.

She is a real adult now, and fairly-happily single, happy enough, and can tell she’s going to come up with some elaborate and absurd lie in the hope that her father-figure will tell her mother not to worry. It probably won’t work, but she can already tell, she’s going to do it. Kriff it. 

Poe ends the briefing, and Snap retreats to the corner of the hangar she’s turned into a nest of droid parts and a jury rigged welding set up that no one’s noticed enough to scold her about the safety risks yet. She’s going to do some work instead of freaking out. They’re still trying to replace the planes they lost at Starkiller. They probably can’t put anything together with the parts lying around, but she’s going to try.

She’s still at it a couple hours later when Jess comes to talk. Jess pokes her way through the piles of rusting engine bits and machine doodads, to make herself comfortable in the old ejection seat with the torn upholstery, which isn’t a spare part because of the tears, but because it’s the only part of the plane they were able to recover. 

“Thrilling briefing this morning,” Jess says. “Good job picking a planet where it rains all the time, that’ll be a blast.”

“I grew up on a planet that rains all the time,” Snap says. “And it doesn’t actually rain all the time, just most of it.”

“Yeah, that’s so much better,” Jess says. Snap can hear Jess rolling her eyes without having to look up from the pieces she’s trying to fit back together in a way that works.

“Could be worse. Could be Hoth.”

“Everyone always brings up Hoth. What’s with that? You Rebellion kids always bring up Hoth like it’s relevant. I wasn’t even _born_ when the Rebellion was on Hoth.”

“Please stop talking. You’re making me feel old.”

“You _are_ old,” Jess says, and Snap can’t even bring herself to argue, because most morning it feels true. 

“You’re old, and you’re grumpy, and you said you’d help me with some repairs, but instead you’ve been brooding in your mad scientist corner all morning.”

“Shit, I’m sorry.” Snap rubs her hand through her hair, not worrying about the grease on her fingers. “I guess I got distracted. We can do it now.”

“If you’re in the middle of something, it can wait. I thought you’d be in a better mood after the briefing — we’re all following your lead, and you’ll get to see General Antilles. But instead you’re all grumpy.”

“I’m always grumpy,” Snap says.

Jess nods. “Yeah, but this is like, extra grumpy. Something’s bothering you, I can tell.”

Snap shrugs. “Maybe I’m not excited about a living on planet where it rains all the time, even if I was the one to scout it. And mixing with the Republic troops — sure, more bodies will be good, but there will be datawork, and you know Poe’s not gonna do it.”

“I thought you’d be more excited about the Republic people. You were Republic forever. And isn't General Antilles, like, your dad?"

Snap sighs. "No, General Antilles is not like my dad." It's much more complicated than that, and she doesn't feel like explaining. "It will be good to see him, but like... parents, you know? They ask questions."

"So General Antilles is not your dad but is your parent? That makes sense."

"Kriff you," Snap says good-naturedly. "And you should stop calling him General Antilles, he hates that. He’ll tell you to call him Wedge.”

"I can't call him that!" Jess says. "I had his picture on my wall growing up, Stars."

"You can't say things like that, it makes me feel _painfully_ old."

"I had a whole flimsy book full of hero pilots of the rebellion. There were tear-out posters of Antilles and Skywalker and Verlaine, but I read the whole thing cover to cover a thousand times. There was this one paragraph about this kid who flew at Jakku. The picture was pretty small, and you were wearing a helmet, but still — if it was me I would have been embarrassed."

Snap knows the picture Jess is talking about. Her mother had it framed at one point. Hopefully that got lost in one of the moves. "Believe me, I was — still am.”

“I wish I still had it, but there was a picture of Wes Janson on the other side of the page, and I cut that out and stuck that in my mirror.”

“Really? Wes?” Snap doesn’t get it.

“Don’t mock me. I was a cool kid. You’re just jealous.”

“No, like, I know Wes, and he’s… great, but like.” Wes is a practical joker, and a terrible flirt, with a dress sense that makes Snap seem stylish in comparison. “This is honestly the funniest thing I’ve ever heard?” The idea of anyone cutting Wes’s picture out of a poster book is only slightly less absurd than the fact that her picture was in that poster book too.

“Were we talking about how you’re being weird about General Antilles who is not your dad showing up? I thought that’s what we were talking about.”

“But I don’t want to talk about that,” Snap whines, sounding so much like the teenager in the picture.

“But I don’t care. I want to know. If you tell me, then I can be helpful. You know I can be very helpful, Snap.”

The thing is, Jess probably would be helpful. There’s a chance that she’ll either talk Snap out of doing something stupid, or help make the stupid plot smart enough to work. Jess is good at elaborate plots, tricks, and all kinds of practical jokes. No wonder she liked Wes so much. 

Snap suddenly realizes it’s very important they must never meet.

Might as well see what Jess does with her problems. She probably won't make it worse. 

"So, I told my mom I'm dating someone," Snap says. 

"You're DATING SOMEONE," Jess says/shouts, _way_ too loudly. Snap looks around the hangar, but it doesn't seem like anyone's paying attention to them. "HOW? Who???? What the fuck, babe, have you been keeping secrets from me?"

"No, I'm _not_ dating anyone, but I told my mother I was so she'd stop asking questions."

"Huh," Jess says, quiet for a moment, processing Snap’s terrible decision. "That's stupid. And kind of sad."

Snap nods. It is. She knows it is. She isn't proud. 

"And now General Antilles is going to be here, and want to meet your partner, who doesn't exist. That's so great for you."

“Yeah, I’m really looking forward to it. Should be a ton of fun, to introduce him to this imaginary friend so he can go back and tell my mother all about how I’m happy and well adjusted! Should be a blast!” Snap says, realizing she sounds increasingly ridiculous.

“You should just make someone up,” Jess says, like that’s an obvious option. 

“See, I was thinking about that, but then it seemed like a horrible plan, bound to fail — but then again? Maybe.”

“You should do it,” Jess says. “They never need to know the truth!” 

For Jess’s first five months in the Resistance, her parents thought she was volunteering at an agricultural institute on Corellia, and the lie might have lasted longer, but then there was a thing, where she was unconscious, and Poe didn’t know about story she’d told, and was just trying to do the right thing by sending a note to her emergency contact.

"I was thinking, a girlfriend that's out on a spy mission, totally out of contact,” Snap says. “That sounds like a believable situation for sure, and hard to prove. Even if he asks the General, she can't keep track of everything, I could be dating someone who's on assignment."

"And if you need an out, you can always kill her off,” Jess says.

Snap stares at her friend. "Dark. But I kinda like it."

"Think of how much sympathy you'd get for a dead imaginary girlfriend. If I didn't know she was made up, I'd totally be super nice to you for like a week afterwards and let you have my dessert as long as it isn't fizz-pudding."

"That's really sweet of you. What I'm worried about is inventing a whole person and having to keep track of things and not contradicting myself."

"Would General Antilles be surprised if you got confused about the details?”Jess asks. “Because I know I wouldn't. That seems very in character for you to be sort of absent-minded about anything that isn't related to flying or droids."

Snap nods. “True, but I’d feel bad about it. If I was really dating someone, I’d try to remember things about them.”

“You wouldn’t want to be a shitty girlfriend to a person who doesn’t exist,” Jess says.

“When you put it like that it sounds really stupid, but yes. I wouldn’t.”

“Don’t worry, you sound stupid all the time, I’ve stopped judging you,” Jess says. “What if you’re pretend to be dating someone who really exists? You could pretend to date Iolo. He’d be lucky to have people think he’s dating you.”

“But would I want people to think that I was dating Iolo — if it was just Wedge who’d hear this, sure, but there’s no way it doesn’t get spread around half the base. Not that he’s a bad guy or anything, just very…” Snap searches for the right word, trying to find something accurate and not too rude. “Clean?” Abrasive does not mean the same thing as clean, but like, it’s in the same vicinity.

Jess nods. “Yeah, sure. That. And some other things. Great guy, for sure, but I don’t know if I would want that gossip either.” 

“And like, the last time I dated a guy you hadn’t learned how to read, and like, I not ruling it out categorically, but it would take some extra explaining.”

“You know I’d volunteer to be your fake girlfriend in a heartbeat if it wasn’t for The Plan.”

“I know buddy. You’re making some real progress with The Plan.” Jess has just reached step four of twenty-six in her plan to get Rose to date to her. Four is smiling at each other in the mess, and making small talk about things that aren’t X-wings. Twenty-six is declarations of love and making plans to retire and adopt small furry animals from a variety of different planets when the war is over. Snap has spent many hours hearing about The Plan.

“We can find someone else to do it,” Jess says. “Or you can make someone up. Or you could just tell General Antilles, who isn’t your dad, that you lied to your mom, but that sounds boring. We’ll find someone. I can be very convincing.”

“Yeah you can,” Snap agrees. She’s super sure Jess is going to help her come up with a completely awesome plan of some sort.

“Want to get lunch?” Jess asks.

Snap looks at the abandoned array of engine bits in front of her, the tools she’s been holding onto but not using while they’ve had their very important conversation about her nonexistent love life. “Yeah, lunch sounds good.”

She picks herself up off the floor, ignoring the twinge in her hip. They leave the hangar and start down the path to the mess. Snap is going to miss D’Qar. It’s always warm, and she doesn’t mind the humidity, and even the rainy season is alright. She likes the muggy nights, where the base has all nonessential lights turned off, and the jungle is loud, and the stars seem close. They’ve lasted longer here than a lot of places, long enough to really get comfortable. She isn’t ready to move on.

But the important thing is safety, not comfort, and the First Order knows where this is. Someone yanked the coordinates out of Poe’s head, so it’s time to move along. Snap is sure she’ll like the new place well enough; she’s easy to please and doesn’t mind the rain. 

They go through line in the mess, getting dumplings and big spoonfuls of cloudberry sauce, made from the bushes that grow behind the command center. Their branches lean into the walkways dangerously, ready to snag passersby with their thorns. Cloudberry sauce, crumble, and jam won’t be a staple on Reasd, where it rains all the time, and is the completely wrong climate for the bushes to grow. Reasd has trees that give crisp bulbous oergfruit, but she’ll miss the sweetness and tang of the berries here.

Jess leads them to a table of other pilots, less than half full. There aren't many of them around lately. Lots of people out on missions, Poe still hovering around the medcenter, watching over his runaway stormtrooper like an anxious mother. And they lost so many at Starkiller. And there were never that many of them to begin with. 

But Bastian and Karé are sitting at one end of the long tables, and Jess clunks her tray down across from them, and Snap follows suit. They’re talking about something that might be important, or might just be how Snap found a rain planet for them to all live on. But either way, they’re leaning in to hear each over the din.

Jess doesn’t care what they’re talking about. She sits down and interrupts them. “So, we need to talk about Snap’s super sad love life.”

“Is it possible for something that doesn’t exist to be sad?” Bastian asks.

Karé rolls her eyes. “None of us have time for romance, I don’t see why we need to single out Snap to pick on.”

“Thank you,” Snap says. Karé’s nice. And pretty. And a good pilot. And very responsible. Snap appreciates her a lot.

“Well, we wouldn’t need to single out Snap for being an old nerd, but guess who lied to her mother about dating someone and now needs to lie to General Antilles so her mother doesn’t think she’s a sad old maid?”

“You didn’t—” Bastian says, sounding unfairly excited.

“I did,” Snap admits.

“That’s amazing,” Bastian says, positively gleeful. 

“Look — I didn’t think my mom would have any way of verifying this information. It seemed like a sound plan to get her to stop asking.”

“But now General Antilles — who’s _not_ her dad, but is _like_ a dad — is going to join the Resistance and ask questions. Isn’t that amazing? And I’m going to help come up with a plot to help lie to one of my childhood idols. Thrilling!”

Positively thrilling. Bastian is 100% on board for all kinds of plotting. Karé doesn’t say anything, but she’s smiling like this is amusing. She’s probably too nice to say anything.

Jess explains what they’ve come up with so far, the problem of remembering a consistent fake person, not wanting to let other people think she’s dating Iolo.

Karé nods emphatically at that. “I love him like a brother, but I wouldn’t want anyone to think I was dating him either.”

“I’d have to talk to my people, but we could be pretend dating if you want,” Bastian offers.

“Nah, that might be a lot to explain,” Snap says. She’s looking to fake date an individual, not a group. Bastian and his people always seem very happy, but she thinks Wedge would get overwhelmed getting introduced to that many new people at once outside of a military situation. He isn’t her dad, but neither of them are that good at socializing. Snap blames it on the fact that she more or less raised herself after her mom joined the Rebellion, and her best (only) friend was a murder droid. She doesn’t know what Wedge’s excuse is. (Well, she kind of does, but it doesn’t really matter, right?)

“I could be your fake girlfriend,” Karé says. “That is, unless you wouldn’t want everyone thinking that I’m someone you’d date.”

Snap stares at her. “Um.” Karé has beautiful dark eyes, that are shining and full of humor. “Shouldn’t you be worried about the other way round? I’m an old nerd.”

Karé shrugs. “Nope. Doesn’t worry me at all.”

“Cool. That’s really cool,” Snap says. Force, she sounds stupid. It’s just, the coolest girl she knows, is going to pretend to be her girlfriend, so Wedge will have some good gossip to bring her mom. Her mom is going to think she’s dating the coolest girl she knows. Stars.

Jess jabs an elbow in her side, so she’s probably being weird. She should try to stop that.

“Thank’s so much. It should be pretty easy. And if you change your mind, that’s totally fine, I understand.”

“Hey, it sounds like fun. We’ll just hang out like usual, with maybe a bit more handholding? And you’ll introduce me to Antilles, and I can pick his mind about X-wing maneuvers.”

“Is that why you volunteered?” Bastian asks. “Snap, honey, I think your fake girlfriend is just using you to talk to a Rebel legend.”

“No, I volunteered because I’m a good friend. I met Antilles a few times when I was with the Republic, and he always seemed nice. And I always thought Verlaine was cooler anyway. Obviously.”

“Wedge is many things, but definitely not cool,” Snap says.

“It’s just can’t get over how you talk about heroes of the Rebellion like they’re boring old people,” Jess. “It kind of creeps me out.”

“You’re going to have to get used to it. I bet Wedge says he doesn’t want to be stuck in a capital ship, so Leia puts us all in his chain of command.”

Right now, all the squadrons report to Poe, who reports to Leia. Snap technically kinda outranks Poe. She was a Major when they were with the Republic Navy, and he’s only a commander, but Snap doesn’t want to be in charge of anyone. Poe gets to be the poster boy, and Snap does a lot of the boring datawork while he’s off being heroic. It’s a functional division of labor, except that Snap doesn’t want to be doing sad datawork. But she does it anyway, filling requisitions for supplies they couldn’t afford even if there was someone willing to trade with them, while Poe gets tortured and comes back shaky and half in love. How having the two of them as the senior officers in charge of all the starfighter squadrons has worked this long is a force-blessed miracle. Snap imagines it will take Leia less than five minutes to put Wedge in charge of their whole mess.

“Do you think they’re going to split up the squadrons?” Bastian asks. “It would make sense to integrate the rest of us into the Republic units, but I don’t want to.”

Snap shrugs. The Resistance only ever had three squads of pilots, and they’re all flying at less than half strength. If it was her call, she’d fill out the ranks with Republic pilots. It isn’t her call, but she learned how to look at these kinds of situations from Wedge, and expects he’ll draw the same conclusions. Wedge and Luke were the only Red squadron pilots to come back from the battle of Yavin, and they stayed together. Wedge understands the importance of continuity in the middle of a war. “I think we’ll stay together. I’ll talk to him about it.”

“Yeah, because our new commanding officer is about to be your dad,” Jess says. “Or like. Basically.”

“The closest thing I still have alive, but actually not really at all.” Snap is beginning to worry about how much of the next week is going to be spent explaining that no, Wedge Antilles is not her father. It’s already been too much.

“I was talking to Jhinni in public relations, and apparently we’re getting a ton of new volunteers,” Karé says. “Maybe we can put together squads that are a mix of our people and Navy and rookies?”

“That sounds really smart,” Snap says. Karé has such smart practical ideas. Snap will suggest this plan to Wedge, and tell him that it was Karé’s idea, and he’ll be so impressed, and be impressed by Snap’s life, because she must be doing something right if she’s dating someone which such good ideas.

“Assuming we can even find any ships to take on new pilots that don’t already have their own,” Jess points out.

That launches them into a long discussion about equipment, and how they don’t have enough of it, and the best jury-rigged repairs, and whether Rose actually makes the fuel injectors work better, or if it’s just Jess’s crush. Snap thinks it’s probably a little bit of both. They talk shop through the rest of lunch, and then head back to the hangar, where Snap makes some actual progress with the repairs.

She mostly forgets about the plan to lie to Wedge. They’re so busy packing up the base to move, she can’t get caught up in how Karé’s going to pretend to be her girlfriend. In between flying escort for the shuttles, they have to clear everything out, and try to sleep sometime. Weeding through her collection of junk that might be useful someday is slow work, and takes all of her concentration. But sometimes she catches Karé’s eye across the hangar, and Karé smiles at her, and it might seem sweeter or softer, but maybe not. Karé’s always had a great smile.

The last days before the Resistance completely abandons D’Qar are surreal. The command staff, including General Organa, have already relocated, leaving behind Connix to oversee the final evacuations. No one’s getting enough sleep, there are too many things to do, but they still find time to play an elaborate variation of light tag, running through the empty hallways.

She’s breathing heavily, sitting on the floor behind a broke down digger machine. There’s a bang, and she sees Karé duck through the door on the other end of the corridor. She’s ready to haul herself back up and start running, but hesitates for some reason — maybe she wants to see what Karé does, maybe she’s just old and moves a lot faster in an X-wing than on her feet.

Karé could tag her, but she doesn’t. She holds her fingers over her lips, and ducks to the side of the doorway. When Poe bangs through the door a minute later, Snap has her torch up, and flashes Poe before he has a chance to realize anyone is there. He swears at them for a while, then heads back to the command center to do five jumping jacks and hopes someone lets him free. 

“Good kill,” Karé says.

“You got him in here, I just shot,” Snap says.

“Yeah, but you could have shot me too. That’s why I’ll count to five before I go after you.”

“Kriff.” Snap takes off running. Maybe she’ll be able to lose Karé somewhere in the medcenter.

Bastian tags her when she doesn’t do a good enough job checking the corners, but he doesn’t last long after that. Karé is one of the last players left. She gets tagged by Paige, who battles it out with Connix for another hour and a half while the rest of them sit around drinking, before it’s finally declared a draw.

Sitting around with her pilots and the barebones support staff left, Snap feels young and happy. Only it’s better than when she was a kid in the Navy, because she’s a grown woman and knows herself now. She wouldn’t want to go backwards, wouldn’t want to relive her twenties, or her thirties. It’s just good to know that she can still feel light like this, after Starkiller, after everything. 

Snap escorts the last Resistance shuttle to leave D’Qar a few days later. She follows Connix through the halls, one last sweep to make sure that nothing worth holding onto is being left behind. They don’t find anything, the teams that came before them did too good of a job packing. Even by Snap’s low standards none of the salvage is worth taking. 

Once they leave, the jungle will come and take back what used to be a part of it. Vines will choke buildings, roots will tear up the landing strip, and the cloudberry bushes will overwhelm the paths with no one to beat them back. Quickly now, what remains of the base will start to disappear.

They take to the air, two X-wings escorting an old shuttle. Snap looks below for the last time, at the base she spent the last few years calling home. Before this, the last place she called home was Hosnia, and there’s no going back there either. She stares down, promising herself to remember this specific shade of green for as long as she lives, not looking away until it’s time to engage the hyperdrive. 

There are a thousand things to do at the new base. Poe is off on another mission, so Snap is going over inventory reports, and putting hopeful new recruits through training sims. Technically, she’s unpacked, which is easy, because she barely owns anything. But she hasn’t actually spent time awake in her quarters. Seniority has its perks — she doesn’t have to share, and has a big window looking into a rainy courtyard.

The base used to be the campus of a University that was abandoned when the Empire fell. There’s nothing else on the continent, and only a rudimentary outpost on the other side of the planet. Someplace totally deserted would have been better, but unpopulated planets that are hospitable to life are hard to find. They’re far enough out of the way for anyone to stumble over them, and the Imperial history of the place makes it unlikely anyone would think of looking for them here. It’s hard to imagine General Leia Organa’s Resistance squatting where they used to train Imperial data wonks, and the First Order lacks imagination to begin with.

Right now it’s still sparsely populated, waiting for the latest Republic defectors to arrive, still processing new volunteers. They’re coming close to having more volunteers than they can clothe or feed comfortably. There was a day where it looked like they might have to start turning people away, and Snap found Connix crying in the spiral staircase in the back of the command center. But then General Organa made some calls, and Calrissian was able to liquidate some assets to send credits their way, and somehow a whole freighter full of frozen dinners fell into Mirax Terrik’s lap, and was being diverted to them. The Resistance would keep going, for at least a little bit longer.

Snap’s so caught up in the minutiae of trying to find or replicate enough of the replacement filters they need, the arrival of the formerly Republic fleet takes her by surprise. Confession: she doesn’t pay attention in briefings a lot of the time. They have the hangar doors open — it’s raining, but not windy enough that the rain is getting blown inside. Snap likes the view. The soggy green hills and the mountains in the distance remind her of Corellia, and a diplomatic mission disguised as a family vacation. She notices the rumble first, and then sees a capital ship appear in the rainy sky.

No one else seems worried, and it looks like an old Republic Starhawk, so it must just be Wedge, and not part of the fleet that consider them traitors. When it launches a shuttle, she abandons her work, and heads to the landing strip where they send important people. She’ll have to make sure Wedge doesn’t hear he’s considered too important to land in the hangar like everyone else, that would just piss him off.

The last time Snap saw Wedge was a couple of years ago, on an errand for the General that involved being in Hanna City on her birthday. She got to spend the night at her mother’s. There was a cake, and a party, and a good time. She carried home a packet full of intelligence that probably didn’t need to be picked up by a senior pilot. She didn’t know how Wedge was able to get leave to be there, didn’t know how he knew she’d be home for her birthday. He ruffled her hair, even though she’s taller than him, and called her kid, even though she was turning forty-four. If the intelligence she was bringing Leia came from him, it was better she didn’t know.

He sends her messages sometimes, brief thoughts on X-wing piloting, maybe a joke. It’s like he’s checking that she’s still alive. So far she always has been able to send something back, _cool story old man,_ or whatever, so he knows that yeah, she hasn’t died yet.

She's known him for thirty years. She isn't going to get shy all of a sudden. She stands under the awning at the end of the platform and waits. 

Leia arrives just as the shuttle is landing. Her days are these carefully choreographed masterpieces, without any wasted moments. How Connix does it, Snap will never know. 

It's raining hard enough that it's hard to make out the figures walking towards them, just three humans and one Bothan in Republic Navy uniforms. Wedge is probably the short one in the front. 

She should think up something funny to say, because they don’t do sappy moments, they just give each other a hard time and talk about ships. You’re _allowed_ to have sappy moments after major tragedies, even if that isn’t usually your style, but Snap still doesn’t want to go there. She just wants to greet this person who’s been a mentor and a friend and almost a parent for the last thirty years of her life, and not have it be mushy or weird.

Like so many things in Snap’s life, the next five minutes are made possible by Leia Organa having wonderful instincts that may actually be force-related superpowers.

Leia greets Wedge like an old friend, which he is. They hug, and Snap gets reminded of how small the General actually is, which she normally doesn’t forgets about. The General seems a lot bigger standing at the front of a room giving orders than in anyone’s arms. Snap’s known Leia for a long time, she’s better at remembering their general is a regular being than a lot of the Resistance, but it still shocks her sometimes.

“I heard about Han,” Wedge says. “I’m sorry.”

Leia looks sad. She says something too quiet for anyone other than Wedge to hear.

They deserve a moment. Snap hopes that in the middle of making a plan to save the galaxy the two of them have some time to stay up late and drink Corellian whiskey and talk about the old times. Snap can just stand there, being awkward but not painfully so, waiting.

Then Wedge sees her, over the top of Leia’s head, and he smiles. 

“Hey, kid,” he says, and pulls her into a hug of her own. She’s taller than him, and has been since before her eighteenth birthday. She’s taller, and broader, and softer, and has slightly more impressive abandonment issues. On their best days, which are all in the past, she was never as good as a pilot as Wedge. He let her fly an X-wing in the last battle of the last war. He’s one of the first grown ups she told when she was figuring out the being a woman thing. Her abandonment issues really are impressive, but she trusts that if Wedge wasn’t there when she needed him, it would probably be because he was dead.

He gives really good hugs. “Hey, old man.”

“I heard you picked a planet that rains all the time for our new base,” he says. “Did you really miss Akiva so bad that you needed to inflict it on the rest of us?”

“Stars, how did you already hear that?” Snap says. The gossip chain is getting too efficient. “And I didn’t pick the planet, I just scouted it. I leave the decisions to the higher ups.”

“It was a very compelling scouting report,” Leia says. “Your reasonings about why it would make a good base were very compelling.”

Snap shakes her head. They’re ganging up on her. This is so much better than having a sappy moment.

“General Antilles, are you going to introduce me to everyone else, or am I supposed to stay a shadowy figure giving orders?” Leia asks.

“Which would you prefer?” Wedge asks. “I know you do enjoy being a shadowy figure.”

Leia cackles. 

Wedge lets Snap go, and introduces the people he brought with — another General, Hares, who’s the Captain of the capital ship above them, and the ship’s senior officers. Snap immediately forgets their names. General Hares is vaguely familiar, but she thinks he was mostly in the Outer Rim, while Snap mostly stayed coreward in the Navy.

There’s this very precise maneuvering that political and military leaders do, where they use manners to have conversations about things that have nothing to do with the words they’re saying. Snap is bad at this, and finds it boring, which is why she’s stayed out of command. Wedge hates it too, but he’s better at it than she is, and is less good at avoiding responsibilities. Watching him play the diplomatic military man is always funny, even when — no, especially when — it’s just for Leia, who knows him, and can see right through his act.

Snap leaves them to it, and asks Connix about whether there’s been any progress on restoring the old hydropower system. Snap noticed it when she scouted the place, and she’s only had a little bit of time to poke around, but they could probably power half their base with rainwater drainage if they get it up and running. She’d love to work on it, but she’s been busy trying to keep their starfighters in order.

Wedge wanders back over, leaving the other officer’s in Leia’s more than competent hands. “I have a package from your mother,” he says. “I saw her before I headed to Coruscant to yell at the admiralty. I didn’t really think I’d end up here, but she sent it with me, just in case.”

Snap’s pretty sure her mom would have sent a package with Wedge if there was even the slightest chance he’d bump into the Resistance, but like, there’s no way his talk with the admiralty could have led to any other outcome.

“She knew you’d be headed our way no matter what the brass told you to do,” Snap says.

“Yeah, probably. I guess I have more respect for authority in my self image than in reality.”

Leia snorts, unable to not offer her opinion on Wedge’s ability to follow orders he doesn’t agree with. 

Snap smiles, trying not to laugh. “You’re alright, when they aren’t stupid orders.”

“Although why you thought the scraps of the admiralty left on Coruscant might remove their heads from their asses long enough to issue any, I don’t know,” Leia says, turning the conversation back to the wampa in the room.

“They aren’t all that bad,” Wedge says. “Some of them want to do the right thing, there’s just a lot of bureaucracy in the way.”

“And then there’s the fraction that want to hunt us down, because it’s all our fault for inciting the First Order, and they never would have created a superweapon if we didn’t stand up to them, and it’s all so kriffing pathetic, that I—” Leia doesn’t finish her sentence. “This can wait until later. I have to go take a call, but Lieutenant Connix can get the rest of you set up in our meeting room.”

“Come rescue me around dinnertime?” Wedge asks. “We can eat something, you can give me a tour?”

“I’ll come up with some dire piloting emergency so Leia will let you leave.”

“Dire, but not like, too dire. I’m sure you’ll figure out something believable and smart.”

“I’m great at lying to my commanding officer, you’ll be super proud.”

Wedge smiles. “I’m always proud.” Leia shouts at him to keep up. “I’ll see you at dinner. And I want to meet the new sweetheart your mother told me about.”

Oh. Yeah. That. Wedge claps her on the back and turns to follow Connix. 

Snap heads back to the hangar, looking for Karé to ask if she’s still up for the lying, and maybe getting dinner? Maybe Karé will say no. They could still not do the lying. That’s still on the table. She could still make a smarter choice.

Maybe, but the first person she runs into is Jess Pava, who is a _bad influence._

Jess wants to hear all about the Great Rebel Hero General Antilles, and really wants to hear all about how Snap is going to lie to the Great Rebel Hero General Antilles about dating her super cool friend. Jess is super excited about the whole thing. Jess does _not_ want to get dinner with the Great Rebel Hero General Antilles, at least not tonight. “I need some time to get used to the idea,” Jess says. “Wait until he’s settled in, then maybe I’ll be less weird. Besides, if you’re introducing him to anyone, it should be Karé.”

“You still don’t think that’s a terrible idea?” Snap says.

“I still think it’s a great idea,” Jess says.

Snap is a grown woman. She’s forty-six years old. She’s fought in two wars. She likes to think she’s decently smart, if not always that self aware. She should know better than to take advice about her love life, or the lie of her love life, from Jessika Pava. But kriff it. Why not?

Life is short, and tomorrow they might all die, so she might as well continue to let the parental figures think she’s in a well adjusted relationship. Might as well.

So she goes to talk to Karé, because like, Wedge isn’t going to ask many questions, but if they’re doing this, they should get their story figured out.

Karé is under her X-Wing, orange flight suit tied around her waist, and a thin tank top that makes how good her arms are really obvious. 

“Hey Snap,” Karé says. “Is this about the Republic ship up there, or did you manage to get ahold of more filters?”

“The Republic ship. Though they might have more filters to share, I haven’t talked to anyone about it yet.” The screens on the X-Wing’s air filtration system are supposed to be changed every two years, and they’re all at least six months past that. Old filters alone shouldn’t kill them,, but they put more dust in the air, and it can be tricky to maneuver or fire back if you’re sneezing all the time.

“Did you see get to see General Antilles?”

“Yeah,” Snap says. “Yeah, it was nice.” She hadn’t consciously realized she was missing him until he was there in front of her, but yeah, it was nice. “I’m going to meet him for dinner tonight, and he wants to meet you — or, like, the idea of what you are, but, yeah.”

“I can do dinner,” Karé says. “I’m supervising the early patrols tomorrow, but dinner’s fine, as long as it doesn’t go too late.”

“Perfect, I’m supposed to come up with a reason to drag Wedge away from the General’s meeting. An early dinner will be great.”

“Glad to help,” Karé says, smiling.

“Thank you so much. For going along with all of this. It’s just — thank you.” 

Karé shrugs, like it’s nothing, and maybe it _is_ nothing if you’re cool like Karé. Snap’s going to pretend she’s cool and it’s nothing to her too. 

“We should maybe go over, like, our beautiful fake romance?” Snap says. “So that we don’t contradict each other in obvious ways.”

Karé nods. This is a good practical aspect of their good not completely terrible plan. “When did you tell your mother we started dating?” Karé asks.

“A couple of weeks before Starkiller.”

“Okay, so we can say we started dating right before that. Let’s make up as little as possible — I thought you seemed cool when we were both with the Republic, but we never worked together. And then we started flying together with Black Squadron, and started to get to know each other better, and then like. Things proceeded.”

“You thought I seemed cool when we were both with the Republic?” Snap says, which really isn’t the thing to fixate on there, but like. Really?

“I mean, maybe not _cool_ but I thought you seemed nice? When I was new, there were so many older pilots with a lot of ego, who all thought they knew better than me about everything, but you didn’t seem like that.”

When Karé was starting in the Navy, Snap was in her early thirties, and her life was a huge mess. A happy sort of mess, where she was figuring things out, growing, maybe even flourishing. She was figuring out what sort of woman she was, and that wasn’t exactly easy, but she was happily fumbling along. Incredibly happily, but still, overall, her life was undoubtedly a huge mess. Good to know her self doubt was both obvious and somehow becoming? Surprising, but good.

They decide a few more things — their first date was a walk through the jungle, which is really the only option at D’Qar unless you find the mess romantic. They’re good enough friends that they can coast along on the things they already know about each other. Snap’s never been good at dating someone she wasn’t friends with already, so that at least is believable.

Snap goes back to her stack of repair requests, trying to see if there’s anything else they can fabricate instead of buy, even though she’s gone through most of it three times before. Better to do useless busy work than think about her lies. Administrative work isn’t so bad. In the Republic Navy every squadron has its own quartermaster, but the Republic Navy actually had money to pay people, not just the promise of a pension if they win. 

Dinner can’t come quick enough. Snap gives up on work and ducks out into the rain, dashing from the hangar to the command center. She knocks on the conference room door, cutting someone off in the middle of a sentence. “Excuse me, I need to borrow General Antilles for an early dinner with one of the senior pilots who has a morning patrol. Terribly sorry.”

Wedge is grinning. “I hate to leave you all to arguing over whether or not I committed treason against the Republic by coming here, but it seems like I’m needed elsewhere. Have a fun time with the politics.”

Leia rolls her eyes, but doesn’t try to stop his escape, which she totally could if she wanted to, because she could do anything. 

They’d better get out of the command center quick before she changes her mind.

“Good story,” Wedge says.

“True too. Karé has a morning patrol, and you said you wanted to meet her.”

“Karé’s the girlfriend?” Wedge asks.

“Yeah. Yeah, she is,” Snap says, and it feels good to say that. 

Snap gives Wedge the two cred tour on the way to the mess. Just, there’s the hangar, there’s some barracks, there’s an empty swimming pool in there, there’s a stalemate over whether we should put water in it or whether we should start building skateboards. Wedge laughs, which is the goal. There’s the busted hydropower station, there’s the statue of Emperor Palpatine that someone knocked the face off and spray painted because taking the whole thing down would have taken too long. Snap’s still getting used to this base herself, but it’s mostly a generic covert military base. See one, you’ve seen them all, and Wedge has seen a lot.

The mess used to be the school’s cafeteria/auditorium, and there’s a stage running along one wall. Poe promised to organize a talent show when he gets back from his current mission, and Snap’s only a little bit concerned. They have a lot of talented people, and as long as Snap doesn’t get dragged on stage, it should be fine.

She gives Wedge a guided tour through the dinner line. Tonight they have red-brown vegetable mash, some sort of toast with melty protein, and oergfruit crumble. Snap doesn’t know what the mash is made of, but it must be local, because they have it a lot. It’s a little bit earthy, a little bit sweet, and smokey for a vegetable. Or at least Snap’s pretty sure it’s a vegetable? They don’t get have real meat very often, but it’s always labeled so people who don’t eat animals can avoid it, and this isn’t labeled, so it’s probably a plant. Or weird science Snap doesn’t want to know about. It’s pretty good if you add a big glob of butter. It’s worlds better than ration bars, which is all that really matters.

Karé’s already there, at a quieter table in the far corner. She sees them walking across the room, and waves.

“That’s your girl?” Wedge asks. “She’s pretty.”

Snap decides to ignore this, because if she thinks too hard about it she’ll get stuck on dissecting the parts that are and are not true. Better to just keep going.

When they get to the table Snap has to decide whether she wants to sit on the bench next to Karé, or on the bench across from her. It’s a really stupid problem, especially when she’s carrying a heavy tray of food with a precarious glass of blue milk, and doesn’t want to take too long and seem weird. She needs to think less about it. She sits next to Karé. She likes sitting next to Karé. And sitting across from Wedge means it’s easier to make weird faces at him if she wants.

“Wedge, this is Captain Karé Kun. She deserted with Dameron, and has been a credit to the Resistance ever since.”

“A pleasure to meet you, sir,” Karé says.

“There’s no need for that,” Wedge says. “I thought the Resistance didn’t have time for sir-ing needlessly. It’s a pleasure to meet you too.”

“We actually met before, when I was at the Academy, and you came to speak. There was a reception afterwards. I’m sure you don’t remember me.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t,” Wedge says. “What years were you at the Academy? I’m sure I know your instructors.”

Wedge knows all of the instructors, because he winds up teaching whenever he’s injured. He always says maybe it’s time to stay put and guide the next generation instead of going out himself. But he always gets bored and takes another mission. It drives Norra batty. Snap will call home, and her mom will be very concerned because Wedge will have done something important and brave and gotten all busted up. Then she’ll be happy because he’s healing and spending time at home, sure that it will last this time; they won’t get on each other’s nerves, Norra won’t start feeling stifled, Wedge won’t start feeling restless, they’ll just be happy. Then she’ll be pissed because he left to do something brave and important. And then she’ll miss him.

When Snap was with the Republic she called her mother every week, except for truly extraordinary circumstances. She got to hear this whole cycle probably a dozen times. She never thought to interfere, because sure they made each other unhappy, but not all the time. They made each other happy too, and she couldn’t really imagine anything else.

With this as a model of a proper grown-up relationship, it’s no wonder Snap turned out the way she is.

That’s not fair to her aunts, who did their best to raise her after her mother left. They didn’t really know what to do with her, and couldn’t keep her out of trouble, but they had a happy marriage. They loved each other, and they loved her, and it’s not their fault that Snap wound up so poorly socialized and reliant on humor as a crutch. And even that isn’t so bad. There are much worse things she could use.

Humor makes it easy to interrupt Wedge and Karé now with a joke, about not wanting to make anyone relive their academic past, and if any of them were good at school they never would have become pilots in the first place. Snap would rather talk about planes, talk about missions that ended well, make Wedge tell stories from the old days.

Snap grew up too close to the Rebellion to really romanticize it, but she’s gotten to a point where she still likes hearing these stories. Wedge wants to hear about the missions they’ve been flying too, so they take turns, trying to impress each other, trying to make each other laugh.

Karé has to go before it gets too late. Snap’s sad to see her leave, but it’s important to be rested for an early morning patrol. Snap’s seniority and distaste for mornings means she barely ever has to fly early patrols anymore.

Snap and Wedge sit in the mess for a while longer, drinking another cup of caf and catching up. Neither of them are all that good at keeping up with the pseudo aunts and uncles that have been collected for Snap over the years, but between the two of them they have a decent idea what most everyone’s up to. Who’s with the Resistance, who’s with still with the Republic, who’s retired and staying out of it, who’s dead.

They take their trays back to the counter, and Snap leads a tour of all the spots worth looking at that aren’t between the command center and the mess. There’s the tower no one’s found a staircase up to yet, the overgrown orchard, and the courtyard with a semi-open roof that collects rain and then pours it back down in a pretty way that looks like a fountain. That’s a good place to sit and talk. It’s quiet under the eves, with the rain just misting around them.

There are more things for them to talk about, that aren’t jokes, or easy to say. They have to say something about how there’s an entire system gone, including a planet they called home for many years. That’s important. Snap still doesn’t know what to do about that. Maybe that’s the kind of thing you never figure out, never really get over, but they should at least talk about it together and try.

So they do that for a while. Try to talk about their feelings, try to talk about tragedy, don’t really do any of it justice, but at least an attempt is being made.

Snap might get a little bit teary, but it’s not like Wedge will tell anyone. He’s going to tell her squadron so many stories about embarrassing things she did as a teenager, but nothing about the times she’s been scared and needed him. There’ve been a lot of those.

In the beginning, she got to know Wedge hanging around the medical center on Chandrila. When the med droid kicked her out of her mom’s room, she’d go sit with him. And when he got better enough to limp around, they’d sit next to Norra’s bed together. It was miserable, but he was decent company. More than that.

Wedge is more important than Snap likes to admit, really. Better not to think about any of that.

“Are you going back up to the ship tonight, or did someone give you quarters on base?” Snap asks.

“No one’s given me quarters, so I guess I’m headed back up. Leia’s probably still got Hares caught in a meeting, and I suppose I should go back to it, try to make them stop for the night.”

Snap makes a face. “That sounds terrible. We have some rooms set aside for pilots that haven’t arrived at the new base who we’re pretty sure aren’t dead. I could get you set up in one of those if you want.”

“Nah. I’ll be responsible. For a while anyway. If it seems like they’re going to keep going all night, I may take you up on it.”

He won’t though. He’ll sit through the whole meeting, and argue his convictions, and try to make a plan that helps people. He hates the rank, hates the formality, hates the datawork, but he’s good at it. He sticks with it, even when he hates it, because he knows it might save lives.

And, like, Snap knows she’s a good person? She’s been with the Resistance since the start, and gave up a lot of creature comforts along the way. She gave up a whole life plan, one that she maybe wasn’t too happy in, but it was her life, and it was her plan, and she set that aside because she believes in doing something bigger. But no matter what she does, there’s a little voice in her head, that says it will never be as impressive as the sort of sacrifices they made during the Rebellion.

She’s _wrong_ , or like, that’s a wrong way of looking at it, she knows that, but still. Some days that sort of sucks.

Snap walks Wedge back to the command center, where the lights are still all on, in contrast to the rest of the campus which is starting to wind down for the night. It’s still raining, but not heavily. They don’t have to run between buildings, just not dawdle. 

They stop under the eaves of the command center to say goodnight, before he goes back to his meeting, and she goes off to mess with machines in the hangar for a while before trying to sleep.

“I’m really impressed by what you’re doing here,” Wedge says, which shouldn’t mean as much as it does. He isn’t her dad, and he isn’t some untouchable Rebel hero, but yeah. It means a lot.

He’s the one who started calling her Snap, which, she’s pretty sure, is her actual first name according the Resistance’s records, because she’s never picked anything that fit better or that she liked more. He’s the second most important adult in her life, after her mother, or maybe third after her mother and the General. 

She doesn’t know what to say, because she doesn’t want to make a joke, and she doesn’t want to cry on him anymore, so she just pulls him into a mostly not awkward hug. He pats her back in a very reassuring manner.

“I’ll let you go back to the boring meeting now,” she says, pulling away.

“If we’re still at it past three, feel free to stage a rescue mission.”

“If I’m up past three, it’s probably because the whole base is dealing with an emergency, so you’re on your own, old man.”

“Kriff. Guess I’ll have to convince everyone they can argue about how much treason we’re committing in the morning.”

“That’s a stupid thing to argue about. We’re all committing like… all of the treason. A lot of treason.”

“Yes. Treason to a Republic that only nominally exists at the moment. You’d think there wouldn’t be much to argue about that, but apparently there is.”

This is why Snap isn’t in command. One of many reasons.

“It’s probably my fault,” Wedge says. “I talked Hares into coming. I should have just staged a mutiny taken his ship instead of talking him into coming along for the treason. Now he feels guilty and we can’t get anything done.”

“Maybe Leia convinced him it was the right thing to do while we were at dinner.”

“Force, I hope so.”

Like some power is listening in, a crack of thunder punctuates the statement, and the rain really starts pouring down. 

Wedge goes into the warm-dry, boring-dry meeting, while Snap has to dash back to her quarters, getting half soaked along the way. She ends the night working out the next week’s duty roster on her tablet, snug in her pajamas. This is not at all where she imagined her life going, but alright. Alone in bed doing datawork on a planet where it rains all the time. That’s alright. This is where she needs to be.

Wedge brings her the package from her mom a few days later.

“I meant to hand it over sooner, but I kept on forgetting it up in the ship. Suppose I could have sent an aide to go grab it, but that sounded like a waste of their time.”

“I’ll tell my mom you gave it to me right away,” Snap promises.

“The cookies would have been stale no matter what, right?”

“I could have been eating cookies before this?” Snap makes an exaggerated sad face. “Now I really feel neglected.”

“Sorry. And your mother didn’t even try to bake, force bless her. They’re from the bakery around the corner, more than edible.”

“Amazing.” Snap loves her mother, but her mother is not good in the kitchen. (Not that Snap herself is much better.) “And here I thought she was sending some of her own baking to aid the war effort. Weaponized cookies.”

Wedge chuckles. “Could probably knock a trooper out if you tossed one hard enough, even with the helmet.”

“You’re living with her lately?” Snap asks, even though she already knows.

“When I’m not on a ship, yeah, most of the time. She tell you that?”

“Nah, Hobbie did, last time he was around.”

“You’d never suspect it, but he was always a kriffing gossip,” Wedge says.

“It’s the quiet ones, right? Connix knows everything about everyone on base, I swear.” Snap’s fine leaving it there, really. It’s good, that Wedge was living with her mom when he wasn’t on a ship. He can’t do that anymore because he’s with the Resistance now, but it’s good he was doing that. 

“Norra said she was maybe going to tell you,” Wedge says. “We weren’t keeping it from you, it’s just — we’re trying not to make it all complicated. We’re just spending time together and seeing what happens. Not putting any pressure or labels on it for now.”

“Good luck with that,” Snap says. That sounds like something that might work at least as well as their usual arrangement, if not better. It’s really cool to hear that your parentals are just doing the casual hanging out thing. Her love life is made up, but like, the _fiction_ of her love life is a very responsible grownup relationship. She feels good about that right now. She probably shouldn’t, but she does.

“Karé seems great,” Wedge says.

“Yeah, she is,” Snap says. That isn’t a lie.

“I’m really happy for you, and I know your mother is too,” Wedge says.

Snap smiles, or at least tries to. She just wants to make them happy. There are so many things wrong in the galaxy. This isn’t the future they fought for, not the future their friends died for, not the future they wanted her to live in.

Snap can’t fix it all. She can only play her own little part in the Resistance. And she can let the people who raised her think she’s happy, because she is, or close enough. She’d be happier living in peace, in a galaxy where a kid she babysat didn’t grow up to torture her friend, where she really was blissfully in love with a beautiful brilliant woman who’s an incredible pilot. That would be cool.

This is good too. She takes the box back to her room, but doesn’t open it until just before bed. There are lemon cookies, sealed for freshness. A few pounds of good caf, a couple of tubes of heavy duty chapstick. Her mother knows what a pilot in an underfunded military force needs — this was her life once. A dozen pairs of warm colorful socks. A box of the better flavor of protein bars. Her mom used to send packages like this the couple of times when Snap had a long posting in the outer rim. 

There are a couple of true luxuries: a good bottle of whiskey wrapped in a beautiful scarf that is the softest thing Snap’s ever touched. It looks _warm_ too. It’s almost too gorgeous to wear around, but she likes how the bright blue will go with the orange of her flightsuit, and it should keep away the chill of the rain.

There’s a note at the bottom, her mother’s loopy handwriting in green felt-tip pen on a piece of flimsy. 

_Hello darling,_  
_I’m so proud of you, and everything you’re doing out there. I know it’s hard, but you’re doing something important, and I could not be more impressed._  
_Wedge says he isn’t going to defect if the admiralty doesn’t agree to working with the Resistance, but we both know what a load of banthashit that is. I’m sure he’ll be seeing you before too long._  
_I hope I see you soon. xo Mom_

Snap wishes there was more. She doesn’t know what else she wishes her mother would say, doesn’t know what it is she wants to hear, but there should be _more_. This isn’t nearly enough. This is just enough to make her miss her mother more, not enough to soothe the longing that never really goes away.

She should call her mom, but they still don’t have secure lines for civilian calls, and she doesn’t have a mission to fly to a safe planet where she could call from, and even if a mission like that came up there are things here to keep her busy. She should call her mom, but she doesn’t know what she’d say, and just standing there looking at each other flicker in blue light sounds like a waste of everyone’s time and energy, even if it might make her feel a little bit better.

The really amazing thing is that soon enough things feel normal again. They’re on a new base, and they have new people, and the Hosnian system is gone, but after a week there’s a new routine, and things don’t feel that different. They have regular patrols, and Snap’s coordinating shifts while Poe’s on an intelligence mission, and they’re running a crash course of their protocols for the new Republic defectors before they get added to the patrol rotation. They’re waiting until Poe gets back to restructure any squadrons, but Snap has a report written up with her recommendations.

Her days aren’t that different here on Reasd than on D’Qar. There’s the rain, and they’ve lost people she misses, but the fundamentals of her day haven’t changed. She worries about their equipment. She tries to maintain some degree of order. She eats lunch in the mess with Jess. She should probably try to call her mother, but doesn’t. The best part of most days are when she gets up in an X-wing. 

Even routine patrols are a joy. They get out of the rain, past the clouds, out of the atmosphere. There’s no one on their sensors, nothing to see, but they fly patrols to make sure it stays that way. They fly patrols to stay sharp, so they’re prepared when trouble does show up. Flying patrols uses fuel, but that’s one of the few commodities they have to spare, thanks to a deal the General struck with Calrissian. Snap really likes that deal, and not just because the last time they last time she was on a fuel related mission they almost died.

Sometimes she has dinner with Wedge, but Wedge is in a lot of different meetings with the General, and is up on the Republic ship a lot, and their schedules don’t always align right. But this is still more than seeing him once in two years, or a couple times a year, or once a month for dinner at her mom’s. It is a good amount of hanging out with Wedge.

Sometimes she has dinner with Wedge and Karé and that’s fine too. It’s just, there’s one thing Snap didn’t consider, because sometimes her normally excellent long term planning has glaring holes, mostly in relation to her personal life. She thought about Wedge coming _to_ the Resistance, but she didn’t think about him staying? Doesn’t Leia have something more important for him to do? And normally there would be a mission for Karé by now, but everything’s slow with the regrouping. So far it’s working fine, it really isn’t that much of a lie, but it can’t go on indefinitely. They’re going to have to stage a fake breakup eventually, but breakups suck, even if they’re fake. If they “broke up” they’d have to come up with a reason for it, and Snap doesn’t have one, other than the fact that Karé could do a lot better, and the whole point of having a fake girlfriend is to appear not pathetic. 

So they can just keep doing what they’re doing for now, until the next catastrophe. Snap’s sure one’s coming, but that’s just how life is. Until then she’ll worry about supplies, and fly patrols, and get dinner with Wedge, and sit a little bit closer to Karé than she would have before. She’ll enjoy her life, even the parts that aren’t true.

This happy dullness is interrupted by two mysterious transmissions from Gatalenta. Snap gets pulled away from her afternoon of unimportant datawork to go to a briefing about it. There are two different signals coming from the planet, both from Henthen, a small port city favorited by vacationers looking for some kind of spiritual nourishment alongside their beach days. The Resistance uses Gatalenta for intel operations because the planetary government is sympathetic to their cause, but too peace-loving to really get sucked into the fight. 

They think the signals are coming from different parts of the city, but they can’t tell from way out here. One signal is a relatively recent Resistence intel protocol that got compromised when Poe was captured. It could be one of their people, who went into the field before Starkiller, and hasn’t been in to learn the new codes. Or it could be a trap.

The other signal is an old Rebel one, that Wedge says the Rogues used all through the war, not for spy work, but to identify friends. A lot of people learned it over the years, and it was never a tightly held secret. Snap half remembers memorizing it when she was a teenager, just starting to fly on her own. If she wound up somewhere strange and needed to get ahold of someone she could trust, this was a signal she could try broadcasting. 

The whole thing is complicated by the fact that they’re broadcasting on the same channel, one that’s popular with smugglers and pirate radio, neither of which have much presence in a sleepy vacation town. It’s a channel the Resistance checks, which Snaps suspects is something the General picked up from Solo. It’s also a channel that the Rebels used to check, probably for the same reasons. 

That’s all very interesting, but Snap’s a pilot with a sideline worrying about supplies and reprogramming droids. She isn’t an intel analyst, or a comms person, she doesn’t have any special expertise to offer. What she does have is a mother who wanted a way to get ahold of her in case of an emergency, which seemed like a reasonable contingency to set up. So she told Norra, if you ever need to get ahold of me, try broadcasting on a smuggler’s channel from this planet that’s relatively safe, we monitor that, I’ll hear about it. And now there’s an old Rebel signal that Norra would have known coming from that planet.

“It looks like a trap,” Leia says. “It might be Norra, but it looks like a trap.”

“We should go check it out,” Wedge says.

“Definitely,” Leia says, “but it still looks like a trap.”

“I’ll take Snap, and a couple others, so we can split up and track down both signals. It’s possible that one’s a trap and the other isn’t.” Trust Wedge to sound so excited about the opportunity to fly into a trap.

“It’s possible that the trap was set with two signals to split our people up and make us more vulnerable,” Leia points out.

“Well, we’ll be very careful, so that won’t work,” Wedge says. “We’ll be fine, right kid?”

Snap stares at him. “You’re doing field work?” She turns to the General. “You’re letting him do fieldwork?”

“I haven’t agreed to any of this yet,” Leia says.

Snap really doesn’t understand what’s going on here. “You’re going to let him do fieldwork, instead of putting someone in charge of overseeing the starfighters for real, instead of just having Poe do it even though he has zero time because he’s busy with fieldwork? Really?”

“We’re waiting until Commander Dameron is back before we change anything,” Leia says.

“I didn’t leave the Republic to be an administrator or a recruiting tool. I came here to fight,” Wedge says.

“I thought you came here to do whatever does the most good for the Resistance,” Leia says.

“Yes. Which isn’t being an administrator or a recruiting tool,” Wedge says.

Snap is starting to realize that she stumbled into an argument they’ve been having for a while now, which she doesn’t want anything to do with. “Um. So about the trap that might be my mom. Can we make a plan for that, and decide long term command roles another day? Because if it isn’t a trap, and is just my mom, I’d really like to go find her?”

Like, she does have opinions about how they run things, but mostly she wants her mom. With all the moving pieces in front of her, that’s her number one priority.

“That’s what I want too,” Wedge says. He looks at Leia, like she’s a friend he’s ready to argue with, not like she’s their shining leader, which doesn’t happen all that often nowadays. “I take Snap and a couple other pilots, we check it out. We find Norra, bring her back. Or it’s a trap, and we deal with that. I’m not saying it’ll be easy, but it doesn’t look that hard either.”

Leia considers it. “Snap jumps ahead of everyone to scout, make sure there aren’t any obvious enemy ships — the enemy might be Republic Navy splinter groups, not just the First Order. And you’re flying a shuttle, four X-wings would be too distinctive, and we don’t know if Norra needs a ride out of there. Snap, you pick someone else to go in an X-wing to provide air support with you, and someone who can co-pilot the shuttle with Wedge. If you can’t find the source of the signals in less than a day, you’re coming back. We aren’t waiting around for the trap to get sprung.”

“Yes, sir,” Snap says.

“And pick up some Gatalentan tea for me while you’re there.”

“Of course,” Wedge says.

Great. It’s a plan. They’re going to bring the General tea. And hopefully find her mom and hopefully not fall into a trap. Sounds like a good time.

Now they have a mission, and there are so many things to do. Snap gets to go over the schedule and pick her pilots. Someone’s going to get to spend hours sitting in a shuttle with Wedge, which might be fun, or maybe not, hard to say. It depends on a lot of different variables, most of which Snap isn’t interested in calculating. Jess is a good pilot, and needs to get over her awe at some point. This will be good. Snap trusts them with each other. She isn’t sure which shuttle Wedge is going to pick, but no matter what, Jess will be able to handle it.

She picks Karé to fly as her wingmate. Because Karé is great. It’s true, Karé would be the obvious choice to leave in charge. And Bastian would be a fine wingmate too, or she could ask Wedge who’s good from the incoming Republic pilots, fostering cooperation and goodwill, but like. She wants to fly with Karé. And the General said she could pick. And when she asks Karé if she _wants_ to be part of the mission, and Karé says it sounds _fun_ , which might just be because most things are fun compared to flying patrols in the rain. If Karé didn’t sound excited then Snap would have asked someone else.

But Karé _did_ sound excited, and now Snap is going on a mission with three of her favorite people, and hopefully they’re going to meet up with her mom, and it’s all going to work out as long as they aren’t flying into a trap, and as long as the lie of Karé being her girlfriend doesn’t get found out. It should be fun.

It will probably be fun?

Hopefully it will be a successful mission.

That’s what’s important, not her personal life.

Wedge picks a shuttle. Jess spends the next morning taking it half apart, and then the evening putting it back together. She likes to know what she’s flying.

Wedge comes and asks Snap about it — apparently one of the techs asked if he knew what was being done to the shuttle he had requested. Snap isn’t sure what to say. “We all have our things, right? If we were normaler we’d be somewhere else. This is what Jess does to trust her ships.”

Wedge nods. He’s been around long enough, he gets it. Maybe he gets it. He gets it enough that he won’t ask questions as long as Jess proves herself capable of her assignment, and Jess is one of the best pilot’s Snap knows, so she isn’t worried.

Jess is a little bit worried though. “I don’t know how I’m going to do it,” she complains.

“C’mon, it should be easy. Like, maybe it’s a trap, but maybe not. Probably not. It’s a trip to buy the General tea and pick up my mom. Nothing to worry about.”

“No, not the mission, stars. The mission will be fine. I don’t know how I’m going to spend hours in a shuttle with General Antilles and not do something embarrassing.”

“Aww, but you’re always embarrassing.” Snap dodges the spanner Jess throws at her. “But really, don’t worry about it. Wedge is just an old nerfherder, not a big deal.”

“He’s the only pilot to have made both Death Star runs,” Jess says, which yes, is very impressive, but not the story Snap would choose to describe what kind of person Wedge is.

“He literally burns water if he tries to cook anything, and once got stuck in the field and wound up giving himself the worst haircut I have ever seen on a human being.” 

“Both Death Star runs, Atollon, Hoth, Thyferra, and Jakku, and literally every major battle except for Scarif.”

“You know, there are kids out there who are going to talk about you like that someday? Jessika Pava, who flew at Takodana, and Starkiller, and the great tea run to Gatalenta, so amazing.”

“Force no they aren’t,” Jess says.

Snap shrugs. “Maybe. If we win.” If they live that long. “Assuming there’s still something like a free press at the end of all the fighting.” Snap isn’t sure of a lot, but she knows that if they win some trashy parts of the holonet will be interested in the personal lives of the pilots. Hopefully Poe and his beautiful stupid hair will be enough for them, but probably not.

Jess groans. “Why are you so mean to me, Wexley?”

“Cause I love you and think you’ll do a really good job co-piloting the shuttle.”

“I love you too, but also you know Bastian would talk his ear off, and Karé would have to work to keep up the charade, and you don’t actually trust anyone else yet.”

“Well, yeah. But mostly because I think you’re the bomb.”

Jess makes a face, and doesn’t stop complaining, but she’ll do it. It’s a good mission. Snap really doesn’t think it’s going to be a trap, but if it is, or something else goes wrong, she wants her best people along for the flight.

They leave the next morning. It’s raining. No one comes to see them off. They’re just running an errand for the General, not doing anything exciting. Antilles is just along for the ride because he misses fieldwork and wants to hang out with the Wexley kid. Just in case it is a trap, it’s better that they go in looking like they aren’t expecting a trap. Snap doesn’t know whose thought that was, but it sounds like the kind of thing one of the intelligence quacks would come up with, and she’s just going to go with it.

They take the first of a series of carefully plotted hyperspace jumps designed to hide their base’s location. They’re zig-zagging through space, masking their point of origin and adding hours to the journey. It’s boring, but honestly, Snap would rather be up in an X-wing than doing just about anything else, so whatever. They’re keeping comms chatter to a minimum, but every time they check in between jumps, Jess seems slightly more chill about being in the presence of a big Rebel hero.

They get to the penultimate jump before Gatalenta, hiding behind a barren moon one system over. From here Snap is going to jump and scout ahead. Maybe if she gets close she’ll be able to pick up another signal that makes more sense. Maybe she’ll see something suspicious. Maybe the First Order will be waiting to shoot her down as soon as she appears in the sky. Hard to say. If she isn’t back in three hours, the rest of them are supposed to go back to Reasd to come up with a new plan. Snap is fairly sure Wedge would actually do that and not come charging in after her. Like, eighty percent sure. Maybe seventy-five. High sixties for sure.

She makes the last jump to Gatalenta, and nothing happens. The planet hangs in the sky in front of her, big, mostly blue. No one shoots at her, not right away. There isn’t any unusual activity on her scanners. She loops around the planet, staying out of atmosphere, monitoring traffic and unencrypted comms. There’s nothing out of the ordinary. A few local customs ships, some traders, some civilian traffic, even a few fancy yachts that look like tourist vessels. She doesn’t know how anybody could take a vacation at a time like this, but hey, good for them. Good someone has time for a pleasure cruise. She wishes she did.

Instead, when her initial survey doesn’t turn up anything strange, she gets closer, approaching the area where both transmissions are coming from. She isn’t cleared for landing, and doesn’t want to draw unwelcome attention by buzzing the town, but she gets as close as she can. It isn’t close enough to pinpoint the transmissions. There are too many buildings, the roller coasters and the towers making scrambling all the signals. She’s pretty sure they’re going to have to get on the streets with a hand scanner, which doesn’t sound fun.

That will come later, and she won’t enjoy it much, but the important thing is that there isn’t an obvious trap, so the plan can go forward. They’ll get to go down to the surface and maybe, hopefully not, spring a less obvious trap. She makes the short jump back to where she left everyone, and reports back. She shares her readings, but no one catches anything she missed, so they’re still good to go. 

Snap comes out of hyperspace above Gatalenta again, this time with two other ships beside her. They don’t immediately get shot at, which is a good thing. There was always the possibility that the first time they didn’t shoot her in hopes of luring more ships in. So far: not a trap. Cool.

They head down to the planet. They have credentials, good forgeries that make them look like normal travelers. Henthen gets a lot of tourists, even if this is the off season, they don’t look all that close. The upside of not having the resources to keep their X-wings painted with Resistance insignia is that it’s easy to be sneaky.

There’s an abandoned shipping facility on the edge of town, owned by someone sympathetic to the Resistance who’s given them permission to use the landing strip. It isn’t much, but there’s a fence to make the X-wings less incredibly obvious, which will have to do. Hopefully they won’t be here long enough for anyone to get curious.

On the ground, Jess uses the fancy equipment on the shuttle to see if they can get a better understanding from the signals. Even down here, it’s hard to pick the two apart. They’re too close, on the same frequency. Jess think one’s coming from out towards the harbor, another from somewhere in the town’s little arts district.

“Divide and conquer?” Snap asks. She thinks she might be in charge here, officially, but that’s just because Wedge doesn’t officially hold a rank in the Resistance yet. It’s silly. She shouldn’t be in charge. 

“Sounds good,” Wedge says, and every one’s nodding. Maybe then only half of them will get caught in a trap then, and whoever doesn’t can mount a rescue.

“Who wants to go where?” Snap asks. Her leadership style is basically asking other people what they think, and hoping she agrees, which is not very leader-y, but works when she’s with good people.

It would be nice if they could tell which signal was coming from where, because it makes sense for Wedge to be looking for the old Rebel code, but it just isn’t clear. 

“I want to go see the ocean,” Jess says. Snap should have predicted that. Jess is all about seeing large bodies of water whenever possible.

“I’d rather not poke around in an ‘arts district’, so I guess I’m with you,” Wedge says.

Jess doesn’t seem fazed by this, she just nods. Snap feels good that her plan to make her people all get along is going well.

“And then the two of you are together,” Wedge says, smiling at Karé and Snap. “You can stop at a cafe somewhere and pick up Leia’s tea. This isn’t a time sensitive, so you might as well sit down for a drink, have a bit of a date in the middle of it all. Force knows there’s never enough time for that sort of thing.”

Snap can feel herself blushing. “Yeah. Um. That sounds nice. If we have the time.”

Karé smiles at her, probably to make their whole story convincing. “We don’t need a lot of dates to be happy.”

“You deserve a nice romantic moment,” Jess says, because she’s kind of an asshole. Snap can only continue to smile back because flipping Jess off would ruin her elaborate lie. Or maybe wouldn’t, because Jess would tease Snap and Karé if they really were dating, and it would still bug Snap, and she’d probably complain about it, and maybe doing nothing is weird and suspicious, she has no idea. Better just to smile and roll her eyes.

Getting tea with Karé does sound nice. The last time Snap went on a real date was was before she left the fleet. That was six years ago. Not that this is going to be a date or anything. It will be nice though.

They set out in different directions, with blasters holstered under their jackets, and a bulky comms scanner in the hideous striped purse Snap keeps around for covert operations. (She let Wedge and Jess take the smaller one, which was built sometime in the last twenty years, and is actually handheld.) Snap and Karé are taking the train to where they think the signal is coming from. This is an intelligence mission, they’re trying to blend in, which means public transport instead of flying an X-wing low over the streets.

Snap’s done that before. Early in her military career, after Jakku, but when there was still fighting. She was just a teenager. She was one of the last pilots who joined under the old Rebel protocols, back from when they were desperate for help and didn’t care much where it came from. As late as she joined up, they probably shouldn’t’ve let her. She was only sixteen. But her mother was fine with it, and Wedge probably pulled a few strings. And then after Jakku, after the war was over, no one made her spend years in the academy, even though they maybe should have. She used to worry that she was missing some vital education by skipping out on the academy, but obviously it all worked out fine.

Just look at her now!

Snap doesn’t like the train system here. It’s very Gatalentan, all placid and gracefully inefficient. It’s nothing like the subway in Republic City, which was an overcrowded torture that Snap knew like the back of her hand. All gone now. The Henthen train system could learn something from its memory. Snap can’t even make sense of the map, it’s all elegantly incomprehensible graphic design.

“This is terrible,” she complains. “They should worry less about style and more about making something someone can actually read.” 

Karé nods at her, in a way that could seem condescending, but doesn’t. “They should feel very bad about their decisions,” Karé says, and then takes over buying tickets from the machine and making sure they’re headed in the right direction. Snap could have figured it out on her own. But this is better.

They sit next to each other on the train, thighs pressed together on the bench. This is like, almost romantic. They’re both wearing civvies to blend in, and Snap isn’t in her usual off duty slob ensemble, she brought something nice. Karé’s wearing sharp-looking wide legged trousers, and a sea foam green blouse that drapes and looks very soft.

Karé’s braids are so cool. They almost make Snap wish her hair was long enough to do something with it, before she remembers all the reasons why that’s a terrible idea. She’s had the same military haircut for decades, excluding a few years in her early thirties where she tried to conform to coreworld expectations of femininity and tried growing it long. It had got just past her shoulders before she gave into annoyance and hacked it short again.

They get off the train when Karé says it’s time to get off the train. Up here it’s all cobbled walkways, and narrow streets that don’t go in straight lines. It would be hard to fly an X-wing through them, you’d have to stay at an angle, but Snap thinks she could do it, if she had to. Hopefully it won’t be necessary.

They’re just looking for a signal. They loiter on a bench in the train station, trying to make the scanner functional. It’s enough to get a general heading — they want to go East, continue to climb the hill. Snap would rather go up a hill in an X-wing than on foot, and this one is unfortunately steep. And it’s hard, having to stop every half a block and peer into her purse to check the scanner and make sure they’re still headed in the right direction. She should have stuck Wedge and Jess with this hunk of junk. She should have built a new scanner before they left. There wasn’t time, but like, she should have known she would need a close range comms-backtracker someday, and had it all waiting and ready for this mission.

Trying to make it work like this is ridiculous. Maybe it would be easier if she took it out of her purse, but they’re trying to be inconspicuous. Not that, like, stopping every half a block to examine something in her giant stripey bag is exactly subtle.

“Now, be honest, do I look as silly as feel?” Snap asks the next time they stop. She’s set her bag on the sidewalk, is bent over, poking at the thing. 

“How silly do you feel?” Karé asks.

Snap considers it. She takes a deep breath, because stomping on the scanner would not be helpful. “On a scale from one to ten, like, a seven? Maybe an eight?”

“Then yeah, you look about as silly as you feel, right around seven and a half.”

“Sithspit,” Snap curses.

“It’s cute silly-looking though, if that helps at all.”

“That’s something, I guess. I’m losing a fight to a piece of technology that’s older than Jess, but at least I’m cute.” Snap looks up from the evil machine in her bag, and Karé’s smiling at her. That sure is something.

“I think it’s going to work now,” Snap says, standing up, stretching before picking her bag back up.

“That’s great.” Karé’s smile is kriffing _luminous._

The scanner works for two whole blocks before it starts making this very alarming high-pitched whirring sound and they have to stop again. Snap sits on a low stone wall and tries to make it stop while Karé plays lookout. She manages to make the noise stop, but only by making everything else stop, which isn’t ideal. Snap has some ideas about how to fix it, but they mostly involve tools she doesn’t have, or taking the whole thing out of her of her bag to see if it’s just a loose wire in the back. 

“I can’t just walk around yelling ‘Mom!’ until we find her, right?” Snap asks.

“Right,” Karé says.

Snap sighs. “It wouldn’t be dignified, but neither is dragging around this kriffing piece of garbage.”

“How do you feel about running with that piece of garbage?” Karé asks.

“Not great, but I could do it.” Snap hasn’t felt good about running in decades, if ever.

“Someone might be following us. Or I might be paranoid. I want to see what happens when we leave here, but if we do have a tail, there might be some running to lose them.”

“You tell me it’s time to run, I’ll do my best,” Snap says. She hits the side of the scanner, and the screen goes dark. She hits it again, and it beeps twice, and goes back to the screen she wants. “This thing’s good enough to get us a little bit closer.”

They set back out, Snap focused on coaxing a direction out of the junk machine, Karé paying close attention to the world around them. They get most of the block away from where they started, when Karé pauses. Snap gets ten feet further before realizing, and then she doubles back to stand next to Karé. She looks around for something suspicious, but doesn’t see anything, which in no way means there isn’t anything to see.

“I don’t like this,” Karé murmurs, talking more to herself than Snap.

She grabs Snap’s hand.

“Okay, it’s time for us to run.”

Snap manages to nod before they’re off, Karé pulling her along. They go up the street, up the hill, and then down an alley. Karé looks both ways, then leads them through an archway, through a narrow corridor that spits them out in a courtyard full of roses. Then like four other turns, and Snap only knows what direction they’re going because that’s a skill that Snap’s worked very hard to cultivate as a fighter pilot. They cross a busy avenue, with a trolley car, and restaurants spilling tables onto the sidewalks. Karé brings them down another, quieter street, down another alley, to a small cafe with dark windows.

She hasn’t let go off Snap’s hand.

That’s _great._

“I guess it’s time for our caf date?” Karé says. “I’ll order if you want to sit down and start trying to fix that thing?”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“What do you want?”

Snap looks up at the menu, written on the wall behind the counter, with so many choices it makes her head spin. “Surprise me,” She says, because she trusts Karé and has no idea what she wants. “Anything that’s fancy and I’d never be able to get anything like it on base.”

“Awesome.” 

She has to let go of Karé’s hand to go find a table, which is a little bit terrible, because she had really been enjoying the hand holding, but also, this machine needs to be fixed, and in a little bit she will have a delicious extravagant caf drink.

She gets a table in the corner, with a good view of all the doors. She does know some things about spy stuff. She puts her purse up on the table, rolls up her metaphorical sleeves, and gets to work. It is _not_ just a loose wire on the back. That is a problem, but just one of many. She doesn’t know where this scanner came from, but there’s sand everywhere inside, which has scratched up a bunch of delicate things, not bad enough to make them stop working, but bad enough to make them work painfully slow.

Snap likes tinkering. She’s been tinkering longer than she’s been flying. She misses it when she’s too busy to have a project. Rebuilding a twenty year old scanner really is her idea of a fun time, but not in the middle of a mission.

She’s going to get it working, because she _has_ to get it working. Maybe if she takes her com apart, and uses that to get the readings instead of the glitchy screen, and if she empties the sand out, and if she makes everything stick together better. That should work? That’s a good start to working _better_. She can’t decide if she wants to build a whole new scanner when she gets back to base, or if she never wants to think about this kind of technology again. Both, but that isn’t possible.

She feels a little bit bad dumping so much sand on the floor of this nice cafe, but there’s nothing to be done. She has to get this piece of shit scanner working. For the Resistance. For the good of the galaxy. She’s a woman with a microtool, a roll of all-purpose tape, and her wits. She can fix anything she sets her mind to.

She does what she can to improve the hardware, and then initiates a system restore. That should make it less temperamental, though she won’t be able to tell until it turns itself back on.

Karé comes back with a big mug, topped off with whipped cream and light blue sprinkles. It is the most appetizing thing Snap has seen in…ages, honestly, she has no idea. The cookies from her mom were good and all, but this is a masterpiece.

It is so beautiful that Snap doesn’t think before she opens her mouth and says, “I think I love you.” 

Karé laughs, in a friendly way, not a mean way, and makes it not weird, amazingly. Snap really is half in love, and could get the rest of the way there quick enough, if it was an option, if it wasn’t for the whole fake thing.

Whatever, she isn’t pathetic. She knows what she need to do to make the scanner work, it’s all fine. She set the repairs away for a minute, because a cup of caf this glorious deserves her full attention.

She takes a sip, and closes her eyes, savoring it. This is the stuff of life.

In the six years Snap has been with the Resistance, they have never run out of caf, no matter how dire the rest of the ration situation has gotten. She thinks Leia would kill someone if that happened. 

There’s always caf on base, but it’s never this good. The mess always has a pot of caf, but it’s always sludge, usually burnt, made drinkable with sweetener and powdered milk. The stuff in the pilot’s ready room is usually a bit better, but that doesn’t mean much. The caf in the pilot’s ready room is always heartspeedingly strong, brewed for fuel, not for pleasure.

This cup here is pure pleasure.

There was a cafe a few blocks from her apartment in Republic City, on the way to where she caught the train to the base. She probably stopped there at least three times a week for the couple of years Vima and her were living out that way, and hardly thought anything of it.

There was a month, one spring, where they were trying to set aside money to maybe buy a house, and she tried to give up buying caf. She could brew it at home, and there was always more on base. She walked by the little cafe, day after day, with her travel mug in her hand, trying to convince herself that was good enough.

She regrets that now, on many levels. Denying herself pleasures for a future she wasn’t sure she wanted, a future she walked out on. She should have spent her credits while she could — fancy caf every morning, ordering takeout every night, all the useless electronics she drooled over. Maybe it would have been harder to leave that life behind though? But no. She knew this was what she had to do.

Terrible caf, not enough sleep, in an uncomfortable bed, to be here doing her part in the galactic fight against fascism. Worth it.

Karé’s cup of caf isn’t so extravagant, just a latté, with wonderful looking foam. Simple, understated, undeniably gorgeous — a bit like Karé herself, or maybe Snap’s just feeling sentimental.

“That looks nice,” Snap says.

Karé makes a soft satisfied noise that makes Snap think filthy things. Even beside that, sitting here with Karé it too much, it makes her want _too much_. It’s so easy to picture this as real, drinking caf with her girlfriend, having something like a normal life, losing sight of the war they’re a part of.

It’s nice, to sit with Karé, and drink good caf, and not talk about anything. They can be quiet and enjoy each other’s company in silence. Snap isn’t always great at quiet — if it lasts too long she’ll start feeling weird, and has to tell a joke, even if the moment doesn’t really call for humor. With Karé though, she can just chill, be something close to calm. 

“I guess we can tell Wedge we got our caf date,” Snap says. This will make a good story. It will sound very romantic in the telling.

“If this was a real date, it would be going really well,” Karé says. “I wouldn’t mind if it was real.”

“I mean, we could?” Snap says, not quite sure what she’s saying, not quite sure what Karé just said. Karé wouldn’t mind if what was real? They could what? They could do anything, right? “If you wanted to? I’m just—” 

Old and unimpressive. Incapable of not putting her foot in her mouth. A grump, a nerd. Probably not going to live through this, if the statistics for how long starfighter pilots live are accurate, but that goes for both of them. 

“The pretend is nice,” Karé says. “I like spending time with you, and I like how other people put our names together like they belong. I like thinking about it, the idea of it, but then I remember it’s just pretend, and then…”

“I guess I thought playing pretend was the best I could hope for?” Snap says.

“Why?”

Snap shrugs. Because she’s old and unimpressive and has abandonment issues, and Karé’s beautiful and bright and could do so much better. She knows better than to say all that though.

“I’d want to try, but with the war, starting anything seems…” Karé trails off. “Some people make it work — Bastian and his people, or like Poe’s parents did, I guess? But I was never much good at relationships, and the way our life is, I don’t see how that would make me any better.”

“Yeah, same. I’m terrible at relationships. Like, actively bad, if that’s a thing?” Snap doesn’t think that’s a thing, but like, it should be a thing to describe her life. 

“I don’t know if that really matters?” Karé says. “Like, whatever relationships are in the real world, for people who aren’t a part of the Resistance, they’re different. Actual dates, and dressing up to go to dinner sometime, and certain expectations. We wouldn’t have to do that. I’d still like to bring you flowers some time, but really, we could do whatever we want.”

“I’d probably still be bad at it,” Snap says, because she’s a bummer, and thinks she’d probably still be bad at whatever they decided dating is

“But if we don’t even try, if we’re so sure we’re going to fuck it up, isn’t that, like, against everything we’re trying to do? The Resistance is all about fighting for things that odds are won’t work out, because we want to believe in them. Should we approach our personal lives differently than how we approach the rest of the galaxy?”

“I’ve never thought about it like that,” Snap says. “Maybe?”

Snap’s first blueprint for a romantic relationship was her parents — her father cared so much about helping the Rebellion that he did it without telling his wife about it, to keep his family safe. Of course, that didn’t work. When he disappeared, Norra went off to find him, and when that didn’t work, she joined the Rebellion herself, leaving Snap behind. 

She thinks about her mother, who left everything behind, who left her child behind because she loved her husband, who stayed left because she believed in the Rebellion.

And she thinks about Wedge, who is so incredibly stubborn, who doesn’t give up, even past the point where he maybe should. Wedge is willing to die for what he believes in, and he’s proved that time and again over the years.

And she thinks about the two of them together, how they love each other; it’s obvious they love each other, everyone knows they love each other. But they still can’t make it work. It’s so fucking sad, almost hilarious really. If they were just as determined about making their relationship work as they were about fighting the Empire, then maybe they would have figured out how to be happy.

Snap wants more.

“We might not be _good_ at it, but I think we’d enjoy it?” Karé says. “Even if we do kriff it up eventually, I think we’d enjoy what came first.”

Snap nods. That makes sense. That’s a good way of thinking about the galaxy, a good way to think about love. She wants this so much it’s hard to understand. “Yeah, let’s do it.”

She isn’t prepared for when Karé leans across the table and kisses her, half on the corner of her mouth, but clearly aiming for her lips. It takes a moment, but then she starts to kiss back, and it’s _so good_ , it’s better than she thought it could be, and she’s thought about it a lot. Like, it isn’t actually better, it’s sloppy and off center, and they’re only just beginning to learn each other, but it’s amazing too, and it’s real, and that’s the best thing. Snap’s just kissing her super cool girlfriend. She’s on a caf date with her girlfriend. And they’re kissing. And none of it’s a lie.

Or, well — they’re wearing civvies, pretending not to be agents of the Resistance, but the girlfriend part is true. Good enough. 

It would be really nice to keep on kissing forever, but like, Gatalentan social norms, and they have a mission to complete. Snap might have been willing to forget about all that, for at least ten more minutes, but then the cursed scanner beeps. It’s done resetting.

“Let’s see if I can make this kriffing thing work now,” Snap says. She feels good about it. She feels good about most things now. The likelihood that she can make this crap machine operational hasn’t changed, but she feels a whole lot better about the whole expedition, because Karé just kissed her. Now Karé’s sitting back, sipping caf and watching her work.

Snap’s fairly sure she’s got it. Her mechanical fixes are holding, and the systems reboot did most of what she hoped. It’s working, and should hold together for at least a couple hours. If they haven’t found the source of the signal by the time the scanner starts falling apart again, they’ve got bigger problems.

Snap finishes the last of her caf, and then it’s time to head back into the street. This time it’s much easier. The scanner is homed in on the signal they want, leading them back to the source. Snap follows where it says, taking them further and further into the hills. Karé’s looking for anything suspicious, making sure they aren’t being followed again. She’s holding onto Snap’s hand.

Which is good and practical, because Snap’s looking at the scanner, not the street in front of them. Karé’s stopping her from stepping out in traffic. It’s good for the mission. It helps them blend into the crowds, just a couple out for an afternoon stroll. And it’s amazing. Definitely amazing. A little bit distracting, but in a good way, and Snap will still be ready enough if they stumble into trouble. 

The scanner gets more insistent as they get closer to the source. It brings them to a seedy motel, and they stop at the wrought iron gate to come up with a plan before barging in.

“Does this feel like a trap to you?” Snap asks. “It doesn’t feel like a trap to me.” A sketchy bargain motel is exactly the sort of place she’d expect an agent of the Resistance or the old Rebellion to camp out waiting for extraction.

“Doesn’t feel like a trap to me,” Karé says. “Feels like we might bring home bedbugs, but not like we’re going to get shot at.”

“The Order would never lure us here, they’d get too dirty.”

“The Republic wouldn’t need to lure us anywhere, they could just arrest us in the street.”

“True. I’m glad that hasn’t happened yet.”

“Best to be careful, just in case,” Karé says. Snap nods seriously.

They head up the stairs on the outside of the building, and then along the courtyard hallway, going slowly as the scanner tells them they’re getting closer and closer. Karé has a blaster out, set to stun. She’s holding it low, trying to be inconspicuous, but ready for trouble. Snap couldn’t hold a gun and the scanner at the same time, and besides, Karé’s a better shot. They get to the seventh door down the hall. They’re very close now. They keep going. They get to the eighth door down the hall. It tells them to go back the way they went. 

Room 207 it is.

They line up on either side of the sliding door, blasters out. Snap braces herself for a firefight, or for seeing her mother for the first time in years. Either could be rocky.

Karé holds her hand up in front of the door, but then waits.

“Do you have a special knock?” Karé asks.

“What do you mean, a special knock?”

“Like, when I was at the academy, we had a special knock we’d use if we were sneaking around the dorms after hours. And we’ve used it on missions sometimes too. Do you know if whoever might be using an old Rebel code would recognize a special knock?”

“Not that I’ve ever heard about, no,” Snap said. She heard a lot of stories about flying and drinking and practical jokes, but nothing about special knocks.

“I guess I’ll just use mine then,” Karé says.

She reaches out and knocks. Three slow knocks, then two quick. Then a long pause. Then two more. 

They wait.

The door slides open.

It’s not Snap’s mom.

It’s a man standing in the doorway. Tallish, humanoid, but not human, not if you look at the eyes. He has wide Keshian eyes. Dark hair, stupid trendy haircut. 

Karé flings herself onto the figure of Iolo Arana. “I’m so happy you aren’t dead!”

Iolo staggers back, looking shocked. Karé doesn’t seem interested in letting good. “You were supposed to check in a month ago! I was so worried, you banthashit-for-brains bastard!”

“I, too, am glad you’re not dead,” Snap says, following the two of them into the room, hitting the panel to close the door behind her. If they’re going to have a loud reunion, it’s better not to do that in the hallway. 

Karé doesn’t seem interested in letting go of Iolo at all. They’ve been friends since the naval academy, and they deserted together with Poe. The way Snap understands it, Iolo’s an asshole, but he’s Karé’s asshole, which, like, fair. Snap has people like that. If you ever need a drunk fake uncle to give unhelpful, unsolicited political or romantic advice, you can’t have hers.

Snap doesn’t know the specifics of Iolo’s mission — need to know, except they all talk, especially when they’re worried — but it was something covert, hoping to recruit new allies. He was supposed to report back the same week that Starkiller happened. By the time anyone remembered to worry about him he was a half a month overdue. It isn’t that Iolo is unimportant, it’s that there was a lot of shit going on. But since he turned up alive, they’re going to definitely give him a hard time about being so unimportant that no one even noticed that he hadn’t checked in when planned.

That’s the kind of thing that can get brought up for years, assuming everyone lives. Snap has seen this play out, with Wedge and Hobbie occasionally bringing up grievances that go back before they defected. Snap aspires to get that old and stay that petty.

Karé does not seem interested in letting go of Iolo. He tries to step away, and it doesn’t work. She’s maybe a bit taller, and certainly a lot stronger. He isn’t going anywhere if she doesn’t want him to.

“You're clingy,” Iolo says. “What’s up?” 

Karé pulls away to look at him. “It's just, we lost so many people. The Hosnian system is—”

“I saw,” Iolo says, and lets Karé cling.

Snap leaves them to it. They deserve their moment of mourning. Everyone does. There mission isn’t so urgent to rush past the need to share grief with someone you love.

Snap sits down on the end of the bed, and turns the scanner off so it stop making noises at her. Yes, she knows they’re right on top of the signal here, she can see the transmitter on the nightstand, it can shut up, she doesn’t need it anymore. When this mission is over, she’s going to smash this thing, or donate it to a kriffing museum. (No she isn’t. She’s going to take the essential bits and rebuild it into something that’s reliable and smaller. It will be a souvenir of the first day Karé kissed her.)

There’s a noise from out on the street — something falling, or a speeder backfiring. It isn’t safe to sit around.

“We should get going,” Snap says.

Karé nods. She lets go of Iolo, and pulls herself back together, making it look easy. “Do you have a bag?” She asks.

Iolo nods. He grabs a duffle from the dresser, and shoves shoes on his feet, and is ready to in the blink of an eye like a good soldier. Snap rolls her eyes. Thinks he’s so cool, but she’s got the cool girlfriend, she fixed the scanner to find him. 

“You can tie your shoes right, we aren’t in that much of a hurry,” Snap says. “Do it properly, so you don’t trip and kill us all on one of these hills.”

“I’m not going to trip,” Iolo says, but he sits down next to her on the bed and fixes his laces. That height, it’s very convenient for Karé to reach down and ruffle his hair, which he accepts, probably because she still looks sad.

They’ve lost so many people. The Hosnian system is gone. When Iolo gets back to base he’ll get to find out exactly who’s gone, Ello and Korrie and Han and all the rest. They’ll all spend another night drinking and memorializing the sketchy pilot bars just outside Republic City’s naval base. They’ll all spend the rest of their lives trying to come to term with how a whole system disappeared in a burst of red light.

They set off back down the hill, to the park where they’re supposed to rendezvous with Wedge and Jess, before heading back to the ships all together, so as not to lead an enemy element to their getaway vehicles if it was a trap. It goes a lot faster not needing to stop and poke at the scanner at all, she can just follow Karé, who knows where they’re headed. And going downhill is a lot better than going uphill.

“Why’d they send the two of you to fetch me instead of someone from intelligence?” Iolo asks.

“We didn’t think it was you sending the message,” Karé says, leading them down an alley. “Which, really, did you have to make it so complicated? Using an old code on a channel where someone else was already broadcasting? I know you like being confusing, but maybe not when you want to get rescued.”

“It isn’t a rescue, it’s just a pick up. I don’t know where the base moved, but I could get there fine on my own,” Iolo says. “And I don’t know anything about another signal. I just had a transmitter, not a receiver, and I don’t know anything about these old smugglers’ channels. I was just following protocol. And that was a current code when I left.”

“If you don’t need a rescue, I guess we could leave you here,” Snap says. 

Iolo rolls his eyes. “Give me the coordinates, and I’ll find a ship and meet you there.”

Snap really wishes that the signal they were tracking led to her mother.

“No, there’s plenty of room in the shuttle,” Karé says. “And I’m sure they’d let you land eventually, but any of the codes you know would have been compromised when Poe got captured—”

“Poe got captured?” Iolo interrupts her.

“It’s alright, he’s mostly fine now — well, he’s lovesick, but that’s different. He’s ridiculous, you’ll have to promise not to tease him too much.”

“ _Poe_ got _captured_ by the _First Order_?” Iolo repeats. “And he’s ‘mostly alright’ now?”

“A lot of things happened while you were away,” Karé says, only slightly huffily. “Snap found us a planet where it rains all the time, and we found the map to Skywalker, and there’s a new Jedi, and General Antilles brought a capital ship that defected. We have a real capital ship now.” 

The way she says that, it’s practically bragging. _A real capital ship._ With a captain who didn’t want to come along, and a crew who they aren’t sure how to integrate. But with a real capital ship the Resistance looks a lot more like a legitimate movement than just a bunch of rabble-rousers.

Iolo continues to look unimpressed.

“It doesn’t actually rain all the time,” Snap says. She doesn’t know why clarifying that seems so important, but it is. 

“None of this explains why they sent the two of you instead of someone from intelligence,” Iolo says.

“Oh,” Karé says. “Well, we thought it was going to be a trap or Snap’s mom.”

Iolo laughs, sharp and sudden. “From anyone else, I’d think that was the set up to a bad joke, but you’re too nice for that, Kun.”

“We could still leave you here,” Snap says again, even though they wouldn’t. The more times she says it, the more tempting it sounds. Not really, but kind of. They could let him think they’re leaving him here, for just a couple minutes, and then let him on board.

“We won’t though,” Karé says. She’s so nice. They won’t leave Iolo behind.

“It really did look like it might be a trap,” Snap explains. “Two unsecure codes broadcasting on the same frequency, one dating back to the Rebellion? Might be an operative like you, might be my mom, might be a trap. So the General wanted a team that would be equally fine with a trap or with a really boring milk run.”

And Snap’s pretty sure intelligence is busy with, like, serious intelligence stuff that’s much more important than Iolo, but she isn’t really sure. They’re mysterious, she tries to stay out of their way.

“Is it just the two of you, or?” Iolo asks.

“Wedge and Jess are tracking down the other signal,” Snap says.

“General Antilles really defected? Took him long enough.”

Snap wants to defend Wedge, but she isn’t sure how well known his role advocating for the Resistance inside the Navy was, and doesn’t know if there’s still any reason to keep that quiet. Maybe she should say something. Maybe she should tell Iolo to kriff off, just because that’s a fun thing to do.

But all thoughts of picking a fight fall out of her head when Karé takes her hand, and says, “It’s probably nothing, but we’re going to run again.”

So then they’re running, down narrow streets, a sharp turn, half falling down a set of stairs, Iolo tumbling after them, then more running. All while holding Karé’s hand.

They get onto a narrow alley, going slantways down the hill, when Karé decides it’s fine to slow down. Snap is only a tiny bit out of breath. Iolo, bastard, looks completely unfazed, while Karé is a little bit flushed, in a way that makes Snap want. 

“There’s _definitely_ no one following us now,” Karé says. “Maybe I’m being a bit paranoid with the whole thing, but better safe than sorry, right?”

“As long as running to safety doesn’t involve tripping down some steps and cracking your head open,” Iolo says.

Karé uses the hand Snap isn’t holding to pinch Iolo, hard enough that he yelps. Snap might fall in love so easily, now that it’s an option.

“You’re such a brat,” Iolo says. He rolls his eyes, and then looks the two of them up and down, resting on their clasped hands. Snap feels like she should do something, let go or something, not have it be a thing, but Karé’s her girlfriend now, and she likes holding Karé’s hand, so no.

She smiles, or at least she hopes it’s more of a smile, and not baring her teeth. 

“How long have you two been dating?” Iolo asks.

“About an hour, but two months if anyone else asks,” Karé says.

Iolo raises an eyebrow.

“It’s a whole thing, I’ll tell you later.” Karé leads them out of the alley, and into a wide square. Snap knows from studying the map that this is their rendezvous spot. She looks around, but doesn’t see any sign of Wedge or Jess or her mom. They’ll just have to wait.

Karé picks a place where she’s happy with their view of the square. She makes Iolo sit on the other side, facing the other direction, so they’ll see anyone coming. It’s easy to ignore him like this. They sit on the stone bench, warm from the sun. Snap holds Karé’s hand. There’s a nice breeze. If they get out of here without being shot at, this will hands down be the nicest day Snap’s had in years. If they get shot at, but no one gets hit, it will still probably make the top ten.

Iolo spots them first, which isn’t because he’s Keshian and has better vision, but because Snap and Karé are looking in the opposite direction. Iolo leans back, sticking his head into their side of the bench. “Hey, I see Jess and Antilles. Don’t recognize the woman with them though.”

Snap turns around so fast.

It’s her mom.

She doesn’t get up and run to them, because they’re trying not to cause a scene, not because she thinks she’s too old or dignified to run into her mother’s arms.

Instead she stands, and turns around, and waits. She can tell when she gets spotted, because Norra doesn’t care about not causing a scene. She’s racing across the square, and Snap barely has a chance to brace herself before Norra’s grabbing her in a hug.

Norra is not that tall. She’s an unassuming woman, if you don’t know her. She went grey young, in the years between leaving to find Brentin and coming home to Snap once the war was mostly over. Snap was taller than her when she came home. Snap’s taller than her now, could pick her up and carry her probably, not for long, but for a little bit. Despite all that, Norra is holding onto Snap so tightly, she can’t imagine moving, couldn’t go anywhere else, even if she wanted to, which she doesn’t.

Maybe Snap has never really gotten over being left, when she was just a kid and didn’t understand believing in a cause that’s bigger than everything else, but she still loves her mother with her whole heart.

“Hi darling,” Norra says, muffled, talking into Snap’s shoulder.

“Hey mom.” 

Snap is a forty-six year old woman, with a lot of important responsibilities that she mostly manages responsibly, but still, sometimes she really needs a hug from her mother. She’s really needed a hug for like, years now. She’s needed one since almost immediately after the last time she saw her mother; the hug goodbye didn’t last her very long at all. But there’s been a war, and they’ve both been busy. They’ll have to get back to the war soon enough, but they can have this first.

There are probably things they should be saying. Snap wants to hear how Norra got here, and she wants to tell her mom so many things (but not everything) about her own life. They’ll do that later. Right now, this is enough.

Wedge and Jess make their way across the square at a more reasonable pace. Snap sort of wants to hug them too, she’s in that kind of mood, but she doesn’t think Norra’s ready to let her go, and that’s alright.

This is perfect, and Snap sort of wants to cry. The Hosnian system is gone, and the Resistance is barely holding on, and there’s only so much she can do to help, but this is a good day, and she has her family here.

Of course, it only lasts a minute.

“Shit,” Karé says, prompting Snap out of her mom-haze, to take a proper accounting of their surroundings. A squadron of Republic ground troops have just entered the far end of the square, and are headed this way.

“Guess you weren’t being paranoid about someone following us,” Iolo says.

“Guess I wasn’t good enough about losing our tail,” Karé says.

“Or they could have been following my group, or they could have been monitoring public gathering spaces,” Wedge says. “No point in wondering now, not until we’re safely back to the ships. You want to lead the way?”

Karé nods, and takes Snap’s hand, and then they’re off again. They aren’t actually running, because that would attract attention, but they’re walking quickly to the edge of the square. It’s almost two miles to the hangar, and they might be able to make it, if they’re sneaky, and if the Republic ground forces aren’t very good.

To be honest, Snap doesn’t feel great about their chances. There are six of them, and they’re going to try to be sneaky, and they’re trying to be fast, and she doesn’t think they’re going to be very good at that. _She_ isn’t good at any of that.

She hasn’t noticed if Wedge is limping, but she knows he tries to hide it, even if he’s hurting. Apparently the limp goes back to before he crashed on Akiva, before Snap knew him. It’s never stopped him, never slowed him down in an X-wing, but they’re on the ground today. 

He’d hate it if he knew she worried like this. It isn’t even that she worries that he’ll slow them down, she worries that he’ll keep going and cause himself pain. What a ridiculous old man. She won’t say anything until he says something, so nothing’s going to get said, unless Norra decides now is a good time to bring out that perennial classic, that if Wedge loved her more he’d take better care of himself, at which point, Snap might pick the Republic military prison over hearing that fight again. 

They don’t have time for fighting, they just need to run. Karé leads the way. Snap trusts Karé to know where they’re going, because force knows she doesn’t. They get out of the square, and onto a side street that feels too wide and exposed for Snap’s liking. Karé must feel the same, because they turn down the next alley. Weird how one of the best days of Snap’s life involves so much running down alleys. One of many things she never would have expected. 

“Why is the Republic after us?” Norra asks. Nobody must have explained that to her yet, and it’s not like it’s obvious, because it’s a really stupid reason.

“I may have committed treason?” Wedge says.

Norra laughs. “Why am I not surprised.”

“I mean, really, the whole Resistance is technically treason. But I brought over a capital ship, so they’re extra mad now.” 

“How mad?” Norra asks. That’s when a blue bolt of light flies from around the corner.

“Mad enough to shoot at us, apparently,” Karé says. “I guess we aren’t headed down that way.” She pulls Snap back in the direction they just came, and through an overgrown courtyard. Snap almost gets snagged by a blumpter bush, and Jess almost trips into a fountain, but they make it through, out onto another side street.

It’s quiet for a couple of blocks. Maybe they lost them. Maybe the Republic troops all got trapped by the blumpter bushes, or drowned in the fountain. Maybe they’ll get out of here alright. Snap would like to believe that’s possible.

Then there’s another blaster bolt, narrowly missing her mother, leaving a scorch mark on the pavement.

It’s actually time to run now. Karé’s leading the way, and Snap’s doing her best to keep up, because she doesn’t want to let go. They get down the block, and around a corner, temporarily safe. Karé barely slows down. Down another block, then turning again, an alleyway. Snap is sure these are tactical zigs and zags, not going around in circles. She’s sure they’re still headed in the direction of the hangar, like, vaguely.

Karé stops when they get to a heavily trafficked road. Snap’s ready for it because they’re holding hands, but everyone else has to come to a sudden stop, and Jess trips into the street and narrowly avoids getting hit by a speeder.

There’s an explosion behind them.

“I don’t think we’ve lost them,” Iolo says.

Karé turns away from the road to glare at him.

“Everybody ready to dodge through traffic?” Karé asks.

Snap isn’t.

But everyone else is nodding, and she doesn’t have a better idea, so sure. They dart out into the road, tuning out the drivers cursing and honking at them, trying not to get hit, hurrying along so the Republic troops won’t catch up with them. Snap’s life flashes in front of her eyes after a near miss. If she has to die, she wants to die in the cockpit, not in the middle of street traffic. She knows everyone with her feels the same.

They’re just rounding the corner at the end of the block when the Republic troops show up, causing a true commotion by setting off sirens and pop-up barricades to stop traffic entirely. They’re going to catch up, soon.

They make it down two more blocks, then half another, before Karé leads them through a gate that looks like it leads to an alley. Jess shoots the lock behind them, which should at least slow the Republic down.

Unfortunately, it does not lead to an alley. It leads to a courtyard, and a dead end. 

“Well kriff,” Jess says.

Snap would swear too, but she wants to catch her breath, and her mother’s here. She doesn’t like swearing in front of her mother because Norra is much better at swearing than she is, and that’s embarrassing.

“Maybe they won’t think to look for us down here,” Karé says.

“I think the blaster burns through the door might tip them off,” Iolo says.

“I was just trying to be optimistic,” Karé says. Optimism is a very attractive trait.

That’s when the noise starts, from the way they just came, sounding like a battering ram (standard issue for Republic military police forces) knocking against a thin metal gate. It might not be the best moment for optimism.

“What if we climbed on the roof?” Jess asks, pointing at a fire escape leading to the flat roof.

Snap looks up. Everyone looks up. There’s really no place to go but up, and Snap still sort of thinks that might be a horrible idea. 

“If they have any starfighters, we’ll be toast,” Karé says. True. But there’s no staying here either. She can hear the metal creaking.

“If they had any starfighters, wouldn’t they be in the air already?” Iolo says. “That was procedure, unless they changed it since I left.”

“They didn’t change it,” Wedge says. “They might not have any starfighters. There may be some ongoing disagreements between starfighter command and the rest of the Navy about how to deal with the Resistance.”

 

“Oh, I can’t wait to hear this story,” Norra says. “What did you do now?”

“Inspired a great deal of loyalty, apparently,” Wedge says.

This is the first Snap’s heard about that. She does try to stay out of the politics. But if Wedge left behind a major rift in the Republic military, no wonder General Organa’s mad at him. Weakening the Republic Navy just makes it easier for the First Order. 

“We don’t stay on the roofs,” Jess says. “We just go up and over, and hopefully come down someplace where they don’t expect us.”

“I don’t have a better idea,” Wedge says. No one does. So they’re going to go up on the roof, and hopefully not get shot, and hopefully not fall of a building, and hopefully not die. Great.

Jess jumps up to pull the end of the fire escape down, because she’s young, and this was her terrible idea. She goes, and when she gets to the top and isn’t immediately blasted out of the sky, they all follow after her.

Jess is setting the pace, and they’re actually running now, because being on the roof is a terrible idea and they should try to get off it as soon as possible. They race to the end of the building, and then onto another that’s the same height, and only a two foot gap in between. This feels like the sort of thing Snap did when she was a kid, but Akiva was more tunnels than roofs, and she was a really stupid reckless kid, so feeling like that isn’t a good thing.

The next building is a few feet higher, and has a gentle slope, and kriffing _shingles_ for them to scramble over. Norra’s up ahead, and there’s a moment where she stumbles, and Snap can’t breath for a second. But Norra picks herself back up like it was nothing, and they all keep going. The next building is a four foot drop, and Snap’s sure that someone’s going to twist their ankle, sure that _she’s_ going to twist her ankle. But she’s fine, they’re all fine, or at least no one’s saying anything if they aren’t fine, and they all keep going.

The next building is bordered by one that’s two stories taller, a wide road, and an alley that’s narrow enough that Snap might have considered jumping across if she was twenty-five years younger, but certainly not today. Fortunately, there’s also another fire escape. Snap feels better when they’re back on the ground. Give her an X-wing any day, but she doesn’t like rooftops.

“You think we lost them?” Jess asks.

Snap looks around. The surrounding area seems clear. She’s going to say as much, but then a blaster shot comes in their direction, hitting the fire escape and cutting off the way they just came.

“Apparently not,” Iolo says.

“Okay, everybody run,” Karé says, and they all start running. Snap is going to refuse every mission that takes her out of an X-wing for a year, or maybe for the rest of her life.

It is just running, just moving, just hoping not to die, hoping that none of the people she loves die, hoping they can make this work. Snap has spent six years running, and hoping, and it’s getting exhausting, but she wouldn’t have it any other way. She’ll keep running until there’s nowhere else to go.

Today, nowhere else to go comes when Jess steps around a corner, and now they’re getting shot at from two directions. Iolo pulls her back, her arm is just singed, but now they’re trapped.

Wedge shouts something about finding cover, and herds them all into an arched doorway. It isn’t much cover, but it’s better than nothing. They might be able to hold their own here, for a few minutes anyway, and maybe that will make some difference.

“Blasters out,” Norra says, and they all listen.

Snap and Karé can’t hold hands and hold blasters at the same time, which is not cool, but sometimes a girl needs to shoot back. Snap doesn’t have a good angle. Nobody has a good angle, and the Republic troops don’t have a good angle on them, so they’re at something of an impasse, until the Republic gets them surrounded, or they find a way out.

It’s a bit squished, the six of them squished into the doorway, but better squished than shot.

“I feel bad about shooting back, because I don’t think they’re actually the enemy,” Karé says, “But also, I really want to shoot something.”

“This really is ridiculous,” Iolo says. “We all used to fly for the Republic, you’d think they’d have better things to do than try to arrest us.”

“Not all of us,” Jess says. “I never flew for the Republic.”

“Yeah? So?” Iolo clearly doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about a lot of things. 

“I’m just saying, I never flew for the force that’s chasing after us right now,” Jess says, brags really.

“Is this really the right time to bring that up?” Karé asks.

“Well, yeah — we might be dead in five minutes, why wait?” Jess says.

Snap laughs, and regrets it. “Please don’t make me laugh right now.” She hates running so much.

“You know, I don’t think I flew for them either?” Norra says. “I think when I resigned my commission it was still the Alliance, and everything after that was unofficial.”

“I don’t think doing off-the-books work for a Republic senator is any better than being an officer,” Wedge says.

“Hush, you,” Norra says, as she swats at him.

“I think it counts,” Jess says. “You can be in the never-flown-for-the-Republic club. High five.”

Jess holds her hand out, and Norra hits it.

What absolute goofballs. This is what they’re fighting for: the freedom to be silly sometimes. The First Order won’t allow anyone to be silly. The First Order won’t allow a lot of other things either, but the freedom to be silly in the middle of a fire fight is an important one.

The silliness recedes, but the firefight continues. They lean out of the doorway, and the shoot at the Republic troops. The Republic troops stick their head out over the low garden wall and get shot at. It isn’t much of a firefight really. Snap’s much more used to the aerial version, with lasers and torpedoes. If they had a torpedo, they could take out the whole wall, but it’s trouble to carry around torpedos outside of a ship.

Snap flies because she doesn’t like running around and getting caught in firefights. She did some of that when she was younger, and didn’t like it, and that’s why she became a pilot, not just because she wanted to be cool like her mom and Wedge. She wonders how long it’s been since Wedge got caught in a firefight in the street — ages, probably. Maybe he’ll stop arguing with the General about staying out of the field. It’s been decades since the last time Norra was in a firefight, in a plane or on the street, unless there’s something she hasn’t told Snap yet. The last time Snap was in a firefight was a three weeks ago, a Black Squadron mission for Poe that went weird, as those things tend to.

If they can hold out here, for a while, then maybe something will happen and they’ll get a chance to make it to the ships. Maybe they should surrender, and then break free from Republic custody? That might give them more of a chance to think their way out of trouble, instead of getting unceremoniously shot. That would only work if the Republic troops are willing to accept their surrender, which protocol says they should, but Snap isn’t sure she wants to bet their lives on that protocol getting followed.

As much as Snap dislikes the possibility to surrender on principle, it’s something to consider if things start looking more desperate. She isn’t sure exactly what _more_ desperate would look like, but knows it’s always a possibility. Things can always get worse than they are. Things can always get better too, so it’s important to keep going.

Just thinking that must be tempting fate, because things get worse fast.

There’s the whooshing sound of a ship entering atmosphere, followed by the whine of an engine. Snap looks up to — they all look up, they’re pilots, they’re always looking up at the sky when they aren’t up there themselves. Snap looks up, and there are a half dozen TIE fighters. Fucking fuck.

Wedge starts laughing. “Force forbid it’s ever just an easy pickup mission. When has that ever happened?”

“Never,” Norra says, but she’s smiling. 

They’re still a half a mile from their ships. If they make it without getting shot on the streets, then it’s two X-wings and one lightly armed shuttle against a half dozen TIEs and whatever planetary defenses the Republic wants to throw at them. These are some of the best pilots she knows, so Snap think they could probably handle it, but maybe not, and like, getting shot at by First Order dickbags is never good.

They’re probably going to die. Die, or spend time in a Republic military prison, or maybe both. Snap isn’t quite sure how both would be work, but somehow that sounds like a possibility . 

(Snap doesn’t actually think they’re going to die. It’s just, looking at the situation, death seems like the most probable outcome. She thinks something exceptional is going to happen, and they’re going to get out of this jam, back to their ships, and back to the Resistance base where it rains all the time. But yeah, they’re probably going to die.)

If she’s going to die today, at least she got to kiss Karé first and drink one last cup of really good caf. There are worse last days. 

“You’d think the Republic would be more interested in the TIEs than in capturing us,” Karé says.

“Nothing they can do about the TIEs if they don’t have starfighters,” Wedge says, sounding a bit chagrined for his role in that. He might break rules he doesn’t agree with, but he’d never tell anyone that they should follow his lead.

“Yeah, but shouldn’t there be planetary defense forces at least?” Karé says.

“It’s Gatalenta,” Iolo reminds her. “The planet of peace, quiet, and wildly underfunded planetary defenses, especially in a tourist sector.”

“I helped train some pilots for the Gatalenta defense force once,” Norra says. “Lovely kids, but they’d be out of their depth going up against the Order.”

Things look dire. Snap should say something. Technically, she might be in charge here. The General trusted her to come up with a plan, and do everything she could to bring everyone home alive. They kept on running from trouble, because that was the obvious action, but now, maybe it’s time to go against all of their instincts.

“Okay, I know none of you are going to like this plan, but I have to throw it out there — we surrender— Temporarily!” she has to clarify before anyone can cut her off with objections, “To the Republic troops, and then we find a way off the planet when we aren’t getting shot at from two directions.”

No one says anything, but they’re all looking at her like she’s grown a second head. Surrender? Them? Now? That goes against all of Wedge’s age and stubbornness, all of Jess’s youth and stubbornness. It goes against the way Iolo can be a cocky bastard. It goes against the way Karé is so extraordinarily good and willing to die for her beliefs. It goes against everything her mother taught her.

But Snap’s been fighting for thirty years, and sometimes the important thing is to live to fight tomorrow, even if it means taking the coward's way out. 

“Give it a minute,” Norra says. “I think things are going to start going our way.”

Snap stares at her mother. “Why do you think that?” 

Norra shrugs. “I think we might have some friends in the area that you weren’t expecting to see.”

What the kriff? Stars, Snap loves her mother, force knows she loves her mother, but sometimes she hates her mother too. “Mom. Is there something we should know?”

“Well, I didn’t just come here because I missed you dear. There were some people who were looking to get ahold of the Resistance, and this seemed like the best way to make that happen.”

Snap doesn’t understand. If Norra wanted to get ahold of the Resistance, sending an old Rebel transmission from Gatalenta isn’t close to the most efficient way. There are probably a half dozen people Norra knows who are in some way connected to the Resistance, who could get a message to Snap or Leia without too much trouble. There are ways Norra could have gotten ahold of the Resistance that would not lead to anyone getting shot at, or at least not immediately. Snap would like to think her mother has a good reason for doing the way she did, but can’t imagine what it might be. 

“Mom, I know in the middle of a firefight isn’t the best time to talk, but you need to tell me everything right now so we can start coming up with a real plan to get out of here alive.”

“Just give it a minute. We couldn’t get the comms working, but they were going to be watching the skies for trouble.”

That’s when Snap hears engine noises coming from the opposite direction, and sees a dozen dots coming closer in the sky.

“I told you,” Norra says. “Friends in the area.”

Snap doesn’t know what to make of them as they get near enough to identify. Half of them are X-wings, the rest uglies, an old A-wing. As they pass overhead she can see the only trait all the ships share, starbirds painted on the side in blindingly fluorescent yellow paint.

“What the fuck is that?” Snap asks.

“ _That_ would be the Tanaabian Yellow Aces,” Norra says.

Snap stares up at the sky, at the ragtag squadron, who are pulling some seriously impressive maneuvers as they begin to engage the First Order ships.

Wedge bursts out laughing. “Kriffing Wes.”

“Major Janson?” Jess says, sounding too impressed for Snap’s liking. The good thing about being so squished back here is that it’s easy to elbow Jess in the ribs.

“He’ll be happy to see you,” Norra says. “He said he had a grand plan for kidnapping you from Republic command if they tried to stop you from defecting. Good thing it didn’t come to that.”

Snap can imagine Wes Janson enlisting a ragtag crew to infiltrate the Republic naval command center on Coruscant, and it would not end well for _anyone._

“The whole lurking about and then making a grand dramatic entrance was his plan all along, right?” Wedge asks.

“No, we really couldn’t figure out how to make the ships comms talk to mine, but I’m sure he’s enjoying this very much,” Norra says.

Snap is so curious about what her mother could possibly mean by that, because like, syncing an X-wing to a personal comm is definitely something Norra knows how to do. Unless it’s a really old X-wing, or a really fucked up comms system, which — that sounds like an engineering project Snap wants in on. Sounds like fun. 

Kinda sounds like her mom and Wes decided to just wing it instead of setting up some sort of communication plan, which sounds like the kind of thing Wes would do. Not exactly like her mother, but Wes can be persuasive. Even Wedge can only talk him out of shit half of the time.

“I had other ways of getting ahold of the Resistance, but hiding out here seemed like the easiest way to keep a dozen starfighters out of the way until someone got back to me,” Norra says.

That sounds wrong to Snap, but she can see the (incredibly flawed) logic. This is an out of the way corner of the universe. Nobody would be rushing around like it was an emergency. But it would still get someone’s attention faster than going through the usual routes for enlistment, which are all absolutely swamped right now. Going to Gatalenta isn’t the _worst_ way to go about things, but it isn’t exactly good either. There will be time to go over that in the after action report, assuming they live that long.

Not dying does seem distinctly more possible, with a squadron of starfighters on their side, even if the ships are old and raggedy, and the squadron is led by Wes Janson. Backup is almost never a bad thing.

Two of the X-wings break off from the main battle, and swoops low, flying over the street dividing them from the Republic troops, and then looping back together. The first plane makes another run, diving lower, tilting to make it through the narrow street. It zooms by them, and then the other plane gets in position.

“First run gets targeting data,” Wedge says. “Second run takes the shot. Everybody, cover your ears.”

Everybody covers their ears. The second X-Wing follows the same path down the street in front of them, and fires a torpedo through the wall the Republic troops were using as cover. Snap feels a little bit bad, she agrees with Karé, the Republic aren’t really their enemy, or at least they shouldn’t be. But she doesn’t feel _that_ bad. No one’s shooting at them anymore. Not right this moment.

Which means it’s time to run. She grabs Karé’s hand, and they all start moving as fast as they can to their ships. It’s only a couple of blocks from here. Only a couple blocks, five minutes running, but they would have died if Wes hadn’t come along, which is a sad state of affairs. Snap still gets a stitch in her side running the last stretch, but that’s better than getting shot at.

They get to the airfield, and the ships are all there, thank the stars. Two X-wings and a shuttle, just where they left them. Everyone starts rushing onboard. Karé climbs into her X-wing, and starts running the pre-flight checks.

Snap grabs Jess’s sleeve before she can make it up the shuttle’s gangplank.

“You take my X-wing, I want to be in the shuttle with my mom,” Snap says. They still haven’t had a moment to sit and talk yet. She wants to find out exactly what brought her mom here with Wes, which is sure to be a great story. But better than that, she wants to just sit next to her mom.

“Sweet,” Jess says. “That shuttle handles alright, but like…”

Snap nods. She gets it. She’d rather fly an X-wing too, most days.

“You’re right about Antilles not being scary though. He told me so many good stories about embarrassing things you did as a teenager. Like, so many, it’s impressive.”

Snap just laughs. Wedge won’t tell any of the things she actually still feels bad about.

“See you back on Reasd,” Jess says, before pulling the toggle to slide the X-Wing’s hatch closed.

Snap walks into the shuttle. Wedge is running the preflight checks, and her mom’s claimed the co-pilot seat. If Norra was ever rated to fly this type of shuttle, her credentials expired a decade ago, but hey — the Republic is a shattered bureaucracy that spent the afternoon shooting at them. Kriff their piloting regulations. Norra’s a great pilot. They’ll make it back to the planet where it rains all the time fine. 

Snap sits next to Iolo on the bench in the back, and takes a deep breath. No one’s shooting at them right this minute. That will change once they’re in the air, but Wedge will fly them out of it, and they’ve got way more planes than the First Order, unless the Order have a ship above the planet, but that would show up on the shuttle’s scanners, and Wedge would have said something by now. A half dozen TIE-fighters between them and hyperspace. Snap likes their chances.

“Do you and Wes have a plan for a first jump out of here?” Wedge asks Norra.

Norra nods. “We agreed on some coordinates. And then your X-Wings should be able to talk to his X-Wings to figure out the rest of it?”

“And if the X-Wings can’t talk to each other?” Snap asks, because she’s still having a hard time believing that Norra and Wes really went into this without getting the comms set up.

“Then we’ll think of something else,” Norra says, always the problem solver. They’re probably not going to die today. There are reasons why Snap’s so bad at calling her mom. She forgot this was one of them.

“Everyone buckled?” Wedge asks. They are, and Karé and Jess are ready too. Snap leans back into her seat, and the shuttle lifts off. There’s a moment of weightlessness as they leave atmosphere, before the dampeners settle in.

She could lean up front, and see how Wedge handles the Order ships, and working with a squadron he can’t talk to, but nobody likes a backseat driver. They’ll make it to hyperspace, or they’ll get blown out of the sky, and there’s nothing she can do about it.

She watches Iolo instead, who _is_ craning forward, and seems conflicted between not criticizing the great General Antilles or making smartass comments like he would if it was anyone else in the pilot’s seat. So far, restraint is winning out. Snap isn’t going to say anything about how Wedge appreciates smartass comments. That can wait until Wes gets on the comms, he’ll have plenty to say.

Snap actually likes Wes a lot, but it took a while, until after Wes got sick of making jokes about Wedge dating an older woman. Snap appreciated how Wedge got flustered, but not the reminder that he’s closer in age to her than to her mother. But eventually that stopped being a joke, and started just being the normal way things are, and Wes was always good about encouraging pranks and sneaking Snap drinks on planets that thought she was too young.

Adding Wes and a squadron full of Wes-approved characters to their already disreputable group of pilots is going to be interesting, to say the least. Hopefully Leia will be able to convince Wedge to be in charge of things properly. Snap can just imagine the amount of datawork Poe will wind up drowning in until she feels guilty and starts helping. Snap does not want to help with any of this datawork.

Datawork should be someone else’s problem. The whole tangled question of starfighter command should be _someone else’s problem._ Just like flying them out of here is someone else’s problem.

It seems like the plan is to get to hyperspace as fast as they can, not taking the time to blow the First Order fuckers out of the sky on their way out. That’s probably a good plan, but Snap would have liked to see the fuckers get blown up. Still, as long as they stay alive.

Wedge makes a smooth transition to hyperspace, and the familiar blur of stars fills the viewscreen. Snap closes her eyes and listens to Wedge and her mom bicker over the controls. This is so familiar. It’s incredibly comforting, to listen to her mom and Wedge argue about how Norra’s the one who knows where they’re going, and whether Wedge really needs to know what the destination is to get them there, or if he’s really a hotshot pilot like everyone says he is he can just fly and leave the navigation to her. This is a five minute hyperspace hop, not a day long journey to a family vacation, it’s a completely stupid argument to have right now, but they’re going to have it, because that’s what they do. Snap really does love them.

They pop out of hyperspace a few minutes later. Karé’s worked out how to patch the Aces’s comms over to the shuttle, which makes Snap think she’s right to assume the problem was more her mom and Wes not knowing what they were doing than a real problem.

“This is Ace leader, are you reading me?” Wes’s voice squawks out of the comm. “I repeat, this is Ace leader, your heroic rescuer, are you reading me?”

“Loud and clear, Ace leader,” Wedge says. “This is Rogue leader. Thanks for the rescue, though I’m sure we would have gotten away fine if your sorry ass hadn’t shown up.”

That definitely isn’t the call sign Jess used on the way out of Reasd, but nobody’s going to stop Wedge from using it if he wants. Technically, the squadron designation was retired by the Republic Navy, but no one’s about listening to the Republic Navy today.

Wes cackles so loudly that the shitty shuttle speaker crackles. “Sure, keep telling yourself that, Rogue leader. We both know just how much you need me.”

Norra interrupts before Wedge can come back with a sure-to-be-witty insult. “Yes, Wes, we all know. Did one of the nice girls in the X-wings give your squad the coordinates for the new base? It’s better to get further away from Gatalenta quickish, before they have a chance to track our jump.”

“Yeah, we all know the jumps. They shared the randomization and everything. Ready when you are.”

“No point in waiting around,” Norra says. There’s one last check, Wes talking to all his pilots, Jess and Karé’s voices on radio. Everyone’s ready. Snap barely feels the shift into hyperspace, the mark of an excellent pilot flying in fair conditions. 

Once they’re comfortably in hyperspace, Norra comes over, in all her motherly way, and sends Iolo to the front of the shuttle. “Go have Wedge tell you a story about the old days, I need to sit with my daughter.”

Iolo gets up in a hurry, properly intimidated, which is good, because Snap needs to sit with her mother. That’s all she needs. She leans against Norra’s shoulder, and it isn’t exactly comfortable because she’s taller, and because the shuttle seats were designed to handle maneuvering, not affection, but it’s still good.

“I still don’t get what you were doing on Gatalenta,” Snap says, because she doesn’t. She’s happy her mom’s here now, but she doesn’t get how this plan came together.

“Well, Wes called me out of the blue, which he does sometimes, and he asked if it was alright to stop by, and I said sure, because it’s nice to have company. We made plans, and I even walked up to the bakery for some sweet-kelp bread, to be a good hostess and not inflict my baking on anyone.”

Norra moved to Chandrila five years ago, a few months after the Resistance went outlaw, when it became clear the Republic Intelligence service in Hosnia was monitoring her activities. They didn’t stop entirely when she moved to Chandrila, but it made it harder for them, and the local government was more sympathetic to the Resistance. Norra said she was ready for a change, and was still around a lot of friends, but Snap still felt guilty about uprooting her mom and the life she’d spent decades cultivating on Hosnia. That is, until Starkiller, when she felt so incredibly grateful that her mom was safe.

“But then when Wes came, it wasn’t just him, he had all of his Aces with him — although some of those pilots are very young, I don’t know if they really have the kills to be called Aces, though I guess you did at that age, but they do seem _very young_ , and green too, in a way I don’t ever remember you being. Wes picked the name for sentimental reasons, he wasn’t worried about accuracy, which is fine. But with all of them, there wasn’t nearly enough sweet-kelp bread, although I did make plenty of tea.”

“I’m sure they appreciated that,” Snap says. She could hurry her mother along, she knows her mother knows how to make a concise verbal report, it’s a skill she learned watching her mother. But right now, she’s enjoying listening to her mother talk, full of tangents and a nonsense rhythm that reminds her of being told bedtime stories when she was very small. 

“They did appreciate it, and Wes sent one of them out for more treats, and it was a nice afternoon, but that many people don’t fit in my living room very well. Wes was looking to get ahold of the Resistance, and I think he came to me because he’s used to Wedge giving orders, and I was the nearest thing available? Not to psychoanalyse the man, but that would be my guess.”

Snap laughs. That vaguely makes sense. Like, almost. It’s might be getting somewhere.

“It was a good party, but I couldn’t have a dozen pilots just hanging around my house, and it wouldn’t have felt right to send them off to someone else — they came to me, I’d want to deliver them to the Resistance personally.”

“So you decided to broadcast an old Rogue code and camp out on Gatalenta,” Snap says.

“Yes. Can you think of a better plan?” Norra asks.

Snap shrugs. “Not really.” That kept them out of the way, didn’t disrupt operations, didn’t cause a panic. It would have worked better if Iolo hadn’t had the same idea. “I still can’t understand how you didn’t get a comms system running though.”

“We were working on it,” Norra says, cavalier, like good communication isn’t essential to running anything. She’s going to fit right in with the Resistance, winging it with a shoestring budget and faith in the force. Though, she supposes she should probably ask just what it is her mom plans to do next. Maybe her mom was just bringing the Aces to them before going back to Chandrila, or maybe Norra’s decided that now is a great time to follow her childhood dreams and go study Nabooian whales. One of Snap’s persistent worries as a child was that the war would end, and instead of coming home her mom would go study Nabooian whales, which is what Aunt Esmelle said Norra wanted to do when they were growing up. 

“So, do you know what you’re doing next?”

Norra shrugs, like maybe she hasn’t even thought about it, like maybe it isn’t important. “I’ll hang around for a while, see if Leia has something useful for me to do. I gave all my houseplants to the girl next door so I don’t have to worry about that.”

“Wait, you have houseplants?” Snap asks. “You’ve been able to keep houseplants alive?” Which really, this is not important, but she needs to know. The idea of her mother keeping houseplants alive is astonishing. (Yes, she knows that Norra kept her alive, but somehow that seems different. Her father was there too, and she would scream if no one paid attention to her. Houseplants don’t scream.)

Norra blushes — Snap can’t believe it. “Just little succulents. I only had them for a couple of months. Wedge and I went to the farmer’s market, and there were little flowering succulents, and I was feeling very domestic, and I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m sure they’re better off with the girl next door. I would have killed them. But yes, I had houseplants.”

“Wow.” This is amazing. Snap doesn’t understand the world at all. This is the second most shocking thing she’s heard about all year, and nothing is ever going to be more shocking than the First Order building a secret superweapon to destroy the political heart of the Republic. But her mom keeping houseplants alive for several months is still ridiculous.

“I don’t see why you’re so impressed,” Norra says. 

Snap shrugs. It’s too hard to explain. “I don’t know, you just surprise me sometimes.” They really should get back to the point. “I’m sure Leia will have something for you, if you want to stay around. We have a bunch of trainee pilots you could yell at.”

“That sounds fun,” Norra says. Snap is really excited by the idea of setting her mother on their new recruits, even though she knows that her mother’s teaching style includes many anecdotes about things Snap did wrong when she was learning to fly. Snap did a lot of things wrong, but she knows better now, and she’s willing to admit her mistakes as part of an educational process.

“Or if you don’t feel like training pilots, you could be in charge of starfighter command, because Poe needs a break, and Wedge doesn’t want to do it.”

“I _could_ be in charge of starfighter command,” Norra says, like that’s a totally reasonable idea, which it isn’t, and like she’s qualified for the position, which she sort of isn’t, but the whole thing about the Resistance is that no one’s really qualified for their positions except for Leia, Ackbar, and Kalonia. Everyone else is just trying their best. Even Statura was a datapusher who didn’t have enough of a combat record to sway the old guard before Leia brought him along. Snap is qualified for like, one of the six different things she’s doing. Her mother might as well be in charge of starfighter command, maybe she’d have some good ideas.

“If I was in charge of starfighter command I’d make Wedge my XO, because he likes to pretend that he isn’t all that important, and he’d agree to it too, because I’m more willing to use my feminine wiles than Leia is.”

Snap does not want to think what that might mean. “Mom — come on — boundaries.”

Norra cackles. “Aw, sweetheart. I’ll try not to scandalize your young ears.”

Snap isn’t all that young, but that doesn’t matter to her mother. “Thanks for that.”

“Your Captain Kun seems nice,” Norra says.

Snap can feel her cheeks heating up, blushing unflatteringly. “Mom, you barely met her.”

“No, but you learn a lot about someone by how they handle a crisis, and today she showed exceptional grace.”

Snap can’t stop smiling or blushing. “Yeah, Karé’s really great.”

It’s so funny — Snap came up with this whole stupid ridiculously huge lie to convince her mother that she was happy. But somehow, the lie turned into reality, and she _is_ happy, and her mother is here to see how happy she is. 

It’s a good thing that Karé and her figured things out earlier. Her mother definitely would have seen right through the lie. Snap always forgets this — it isn’t that her mom is particularly perceptive, it’s just that Snap will always feel strangely compelled to tell her mother what’s really going on in her life, even if she doesn’t actually want her mother to know. It’s like a superpower. She got good at resisting the urge to just blurt things out, but lack of exposure has made her weak. If her mom’s sticking around for a while she’ll have to get good again. She hopes her mom sticks around. 

They go through all the preplanned hyperspace jumps, randomized detours to hide the location of the Resistance. When they pop out into realspace between jumps there’s a bunch of chatter, not just Jess and Karé. It’s really bad comms protocol, which Wedge does nothing to discourage.

Her mom quizzes Iolo on his qualifications and career — their introduction got lost in all the running — before she agrees to cede the copilot position to him for the rest of the trip. Snap enjoys listening to the interrogation. The trip home to Reasd seems faster than the journey out was. Instead of being alone in her X-wing, Snap gets to talk with her mother. She has hours worth of things she wants to tell her mother about — important things, trivial things, things that might be either, that she’s still unsure about — but they’re finishing their last jump out of hyperspace and beginning their descent. 

It isn’t raining when they land. The ground is wet, and there are clouds in the sky, but at this very moment, it is not raining. Snap feels like someone should congratulate her on picking such a great planet, but she knows that isn’t going to happen. Instead she’ll just be happy that they don't all have to hurry into the hangar or get soaked.

Snap leaves it to other people to explain that they brought a stray squadron of starfighters back with them. She listens as Wedge argues with the control tower that he’s allowed to give out security clearance to whoever he sithdamn pleases. If they have a problem with it, they can go get General Organa to make him stop. He probably didn’t expect someone to go get General Organa, who sighs at him, and says he’ll be allowed to give out security clearances to whoever he wants once he accepts a formal leadership position, but she’ll make an exception just this once.

They get cleared for landing, and make a graceful landing on the platform outside of the main hangar. There’s a crowd waiting to greet them: Poe over by the X-wings, Rose and a bunch of new mechanics whose names Snap’s still trying to learn, a security team circling around the Aces, blasters ready, and General Organa herself headed in their direction, with Connix and Threepio trailing behind.

Snap, technically, may have been in charge of this mission, but if the General is going to yell at anyone for bringing home strays, it will be Wedge, not her. He’s tough, he can handle it, probably. Snap’s sure he isn’t hiding, he just thinks it’s important that he runs through the full post flight checklist himself, right now, like the most responsible pilot in the world would.

The rest of them file out of the shuttle, ready to face the welcoming committee.

Iolo manages to salute the General before getting tackled by Poe, like, physically tackled to the ground in a crushing hug.

Leia rolls her eyes above pair of them. “Good to have you back, Captain Arana. Report to intelligence whenever Dameron lets you up.”

“What if I don’t him up?” Poe asks, his voice muffled by how he’s talking into Iolo’s shoulder.

Leia sighs. “Take your time, but I’ll make it an order if I have to.” Then she steps around them to talk to Norra. “It’s been too long,” she says, embracing Norra.

“You’ve been busy,” Norra says. “Thanks for looking after my kid.”

“She’s been a real help,” Leia says, which is nice of her to say. “You should be proud of her, even if she did find us this rain planet.”

“I grew up on Akiva, this is nothing. Feels just like home,” Norra says.

“Sure, keep telling yourself that,” Wedge says, finally limping down the ramp.

“And you!” Leia lets go of Norra to punch him in the arm. “Bringing strangers on to my base! When you won’t even do anything useful!”

“They aren’t all strangers,” Wedge says, stepping away, trying to defend himself pretty ineffectively. He should know better. 

This is when Wes Janson decides to pop out the top of his X-wing and shout, “Princess! We’re ready for you to order us about and fight those Imperial bastards.”

“He always has had a wonderful sense of timing,” Norra says, mostly to herself. Wedge nods. 

Leia stares at Wedge, the kind of look that makes Snap want to hide behind something reassuring, like her mother. It’s a calculating look, the politician’s look, figuring out just what she can get out of this. The Resistance can use another dozen starfighters, even a sorry lot like this. The Resistance can use another veteran of the Rebellion who knows what a real war effort looks like, even if that veteran is Wes. Leia seems to make up her mind, and puts on a dangerous smile. “How nice of you to bring in some new pilots. I expect you’ll be doing a lot of recruiting as the new head of starfighter command.” 

If Snap wasn’t afraid of interrupting, she’d make a joke about how there isn’t an old head of starfighter command, because for the last few years, starfighter command has just been Poe doing his best.

Leia goes on. “There’s a lot of recruiting and administration work in your new job, which I’m sure you’ll be able to handle admirably. A nice quiet leadership position where you won’t get shot at by our would be allies and make the holo news on all of the big coreworld networks.”

Wedge opens his mouth, like he’s going to argue — after all, it wasn’t his fault the Republic decided to hut them down. Well, mostly not his fault. But then he thinks better of it, which may have something to do with Norra’s elbow shoved into his ribs. Or maybe he just got smarter all of the sudden. “So — starfighter command? We can figure out the details if Dameron ever gets off the floor.”

Poe’s objection is muffled and halfhearted at best. They need the help. Poe needs someone to draw up rosters and organize new recruits and do datawork while he’s off being terrifyingly brave. And Snap called not-it a long time ago.

Wedge and her mom have to go with the General to figure out what to do with the new pilots, but Snap doesn’t have to. “I’ll come rescue you from the meetings around dinner time,” she says, leaving them to boredom while she makes sure Jess is treating her X-wing right.

There’s nothing to worry about — Jess is talking to Rose, and it looks like they’re doing a very thorough external check for damage, unnecessarily thorough for not having got shot at much. Snap changes direction, letting them have the romance of unnecessary X-wing maintenance, heading towards Karé’s ship instead, hoping for a little romance herself.

Karé’s already out of the cockpit, crouched down to talk to her astromech, but she looks up when Snap gets close. She smiles, and it’s beautiful.

“Good flight home?” Snap asks, for the sake of saying something. That isn’t an interesting question to ask, Karé shouldn’t have to answer that. She should make it into a joke. “You didn’t have to listen to Iolo and the old folks talk, that must have been peaceful.”

Karé laughs, just a little bit, enough to acknowledge the joke, and Snap feels good. “Yeah, the quiet was nice. Was it good to see your mom?”

“Yeah, it was great.” She doesn’t know how to explain how great it was. It’s her mom, right? The most important and most boring thing in the world, just her mom. “This guy giving you any trouble?” Snap asks, pointing at the droid. That’s something she knows something about. She could help with a droid.

“Nah, we got it figured out.” Karé pats her astromech on the head as she stands up, then offers her hand to Snap. They hold hands and walk into the hangar. It’s just starting to drizzle. Snap’s so happy she doesn’t understand what’s going on.

Sure, there’s still the war. The Hosnian system is still gone. So many people she cared for have died. They still need new filters for their X-wings. It really does rain all the time. But she’s dating the coolest girl she knows, and her family is here, and they’re going to stick around for a while. Sure, they got shot at today, and who knows, there might be a new mission, and they might get shot at tomorrow, but right now, she’s happy.

The thing about being happy is that it makes her want everyone else to be happy too. Snap had forgotten this about herself, the way things had been going. But basically, she joined the Resistance because she wants everyone to have a chance to grow up happy and free. Or well, maybe she joined the Resistance because she’d sign up for any cause Leia Organa said was worth fighting for, but she stuck around when things got rough because she does believe all that. 

Snap wants her mom and Wedge to be happy, and stay happy, and not make a mess of it. She wants Leia to be happy, because the General will be happy when they’re winning, and this isn’t a war they can lose. She wants Bastian to be happy, with all his people. She wants Jess and Rose to be happy. She wants Connix to be happy with her perfect habits. She wants Poe to be happy, and have less datawork and less bad dreams that she can hear through their shared wall. She even wants Iolo to be happy, because he really isn’t that bad. They all deserve the freedom to be silly and happy and to gossip about their love lives, but hopefully not about _her_ love life, although asking for that is probably a lost cause.

But now that her love life isn’t a lie or a joke she won’t mind the gossip so much. Her love life is _amazing_ , and it’s not too bad if people want to talk about that. She doesn’t like being gossiped about on principle, but really, she’s too content with her life to care much. Today’s been good.

And that is when Snap has a terrible thought. She freezes, bringing Karé to a sudden stop too, because they’re holding hands.

“Wait — did we remember to get the General her tea?”

Karé nods. “I picked some up from the cafe. It’s in my purse.”

Snap just stares at her, because if she doesn’t wait a minute before she opens her mouth she’ll wind up saying something super embarrassing. They’ve only been actually-for-real-not-fake-truthfully dating for a few hours, even if it feels like much longer. It’s too soon for a declaration of love.

“I picked up some good caf too,” Karé says. “I was going to share it with the pilot’s ready room, but we could just keep it instead.”

That is so beautiful, Snap doesn’t know what to do. “You’re my hero.”

Karé smiles, and pulls Snap down the hall. “Come on, I want to make it to the dorms before it starts raining again.”


End file.
